Month: January 2014

Over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, I review
Brad Ricca’s new biography of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster,

Super Boys (Yes, this review went up a few weeks ago,
but I missed it it at first.)

Excerpts:

More people could likely identify Perry White and Lex Luthor
than could identify the men who created Superman: two Jewish kids
from Cleveland, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. They were classic
schlemiels, awkward and almost delusionally dreamy, bad with women,
and so bad with business they sold one of the most valuable
inventions in literature for $130, 75 years ago. Superman’s owner,
DC Entertainment, has been celebrating this anniversary with, among
other things, a new movie, Man of Steel, alone
grossing over $650 million worldwide….

Ricca has nonetheless produced a sad pleasure of a book….We
meet teen Jerry in the early 1930s, helping invent the idea of the
science fiction fan publication; dominating his high school
newspaperThe Torch with his clever teenage wit (more
clever, from the many detailed examples that are one of this book’s
treasures, than much of his professional comic book writing in the
early days); meeting artist Joe Shuster (who like Jerry, seemed to
almost degenerate in his artistic skills from high school amateur
to comic book pro); writing a fanzine story about a villain dubbed
a “superman” with Joe’s art; and then, after failing for years to
gain the newspaper syndication they craved, finally in 1938 selling
the heroic Superman we all know for $130 to the nascent DC
Comics…

Then, the triumph and the tragedy: watching their character
capture the imagination of a nation (there was a Superman Day at
the World’s Fair by 1940); the radio waves; and the newspaper
comics where they always dreamed he’d flourish. Trying, and
failing, to reverse their bad business decision through lawsuits,
they were fired because of that first suit in the late 1940s.
Shuster fell into drawing some grim softcore porn comics (with
characters that looked pulled directly
from Superman), and a long downward spiral began, the
pair’s destitution and anger becoming the stuff of legend….

Ricca’s a good writer both on the sentence level, and at selling
the emotion he’s out to sell, though he relies overmuch on
novelistic scene setting, delivering his character’s interior
thoughts and perceptions, and perhaps fooling the reader into
forgetting that the biographer is, to put it kindly, merely
guessing….

These are mostly the cavils of one deeply enmeshed in the
historiography of comics. For a normal curious reader, Ricca did
the Clark Kent/Lois Lane reporter job well: he went out and got the
story (if not always the scoop) and tells it like it was.

What it was, was sad. The bizarrely crummy quality of Siegel’s
unpublished 1980s attempt to write a “graphic novel” was strangely
depressing. From its title, Zongolla the
Ultroid, and Ricca’s description, it sounds like
something Daniel Clowes might invent as a bitter joke about the
stunted imagination of the superhero comic creator.

But that’s an outsider’s judgment. I hope it’s true, as Ricca
reports, that Jerry Siegel died happy….

Me in Reason on Shuster’s
softcore porn career, and on the enduring
power of their superhero idea, even in “literary” comics, and
beyond.

Yet another reason why you should really try your absolutely
hardest to settle any non-clearly-life-threatening issues with your
family or friends without calling the cops.

The
Bearing Arms site has a good compliation of various
news reports on how a North Carolina police officer shot and killed
teenage Keith Vidal, said to be suffering from schizophrenia,
after Vidal had already been tased and was pinned down by
two other cops.

Vidal’s original crime? Refusing to put down a screwdriver.

Some excerpts:

[Mark] Wilsey said his family called the police to help with his
schizophrenic son Keith Vidal who had a small screwdriver in his
hand. Officers used at Taser on Vidal and then shot him, according
to Wilsey….

Wilsey said officers had his son down on the ground after the
teen was tased a few times and an officer said, “we don’t have time
for this.” That’s when Wilsey says the officer shot in between the
officers holding the teen down, killing his son.

Then there was this story submitted by a family friend
on CNN’s
iReport:

“…..Two Officers responded to the scene and started
negotiating with Vidal. After about 10 mins the situation started
defusing itself with Vidal becoming more rational. At that very
moment an Officer From another Town Entered the residence and
instructed the officers to stop talking and tase Vidal. As Vidal
tried to flee into the bathroom adjacent to where he was standing
the two officers simultaneously shot him with their tasers. As
Vidal Collapsed backwards on to the floor the two officers jumped
on top of the 5ft 3 100 lb Vidal to restrain him.. As Vidal’s
Father tried to step in and grab the screw driver The Southport
Police Officer that had instructed the other officers to use their
tasers, moved between the father and the pile of people on the
floor and said ” We don’t have time for this” And shot Vidal Once
in the chest as the other two Officers held him on the floor.
Vidal’s father then grabbed the officer as he was lining himself up
for another shot.”

Local district attorneys’ office is
investigating the incident.

Protecting and serving Americans, to the grave.

Is Colorado Pot Overtaxed and Over-Regulated Already? is the
latest video from ReasonTV. Watch above or click on the link below
for video, full text, supporting links, downloadable versions, and
more Reason TV clips.

Sen.
Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has called for NSA whistle-blower Edward
Snowden to receive a light prison sentence.

When asked by ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos about the New
York Times’
editorial calling for Snowden to be granted “a plea bargain or
some form of clemency” on This Week Paul said:

I don’t think Edward Snowden deserves the death penalty or life
in prison. I think that’s inappropriate. And I think that’s why he
fled, because that’s what he faced.

Paul also said that he doesn’t think it’s ok to leak national
secrets that could put lives at risk.

Paul went on to say that Snowden “probably would come home for
some penalty of a few years in prison,” adding that Director of
National Intelligence James Clapper “probably deserves” a similar
sentence for lying to Congress.

The lie
Paul referred to took place during a Senate hearing in March,
2013. At that hearing, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked Clapper, “Does
the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of
millions of Americans?” Clapper replied “No sir.” When Wyden
responded “It does not?” Clapper said that the NSA does “not
wittingly” collect the amount of data Wyden referred to. Clapper
has since apologized for his response, calling it
“clearly erroneous.”

Watch the exchange below:

Paul has filed a
class-action lawsuit against the NSA “to say to the government
and to the NSA, No, you can’t have our records without our
permission or without a warrant specific to an individual.”

Ken Cuccinelli, the former Virginia attorney general and
gubernatorial candidate, will be a legal adviser for the suit.

Unsurprisingly, Paul’s comments on the NSA have been criticized
by Rep.
Peter King (R-N.Y.), who says that Paul “doesn’t deserve to be
in the United States Senate” and that he “does not know what he’s
talking about.”

Make a social concern go away just by
hiking taxes on it? Why haven’t the drug warriors thought of that?
Anyway, I’ll be on the Thom Hartmann show at 3pm
ET to discuss a study that
proposes tripling cigarette taxes as a means to lower tobacco
consumption around the world. It’s a brilliant idea that, clearly,
has
never occurred to policymakers in the past. What could
possibly go wrong with such a simple idea for reducing people’s
taste for tobacco? What cynical fool would ever suggest
unintended consequences might occur?

Tune in for the fun.

The New York Times

reports that Gov. Andrew Cuomo, perhaps having noticed
that four-fifths of New Yorkers
support legal access to medical marijuana, has reversed his
position on the issue. According to the Times, Cuomo will
announce in his State of the State speech on Wednesday that
he plans to make marijuana available to patients with
specified conditions through a state-controlled distribution
system. That system supposedly is authorized by an obscure
law establishing something called the Antonio G. Olivieri
Controlled Substance Therapeutic Research Program.

The New York law is one of several medical marijuana bills
passed by state legislatures in the early 1980s, a period when even
Newt Gingrich, later known as a hardline drug
warrior, thought patients who could benefit from cannabis
should be able to obtain it legally. In 1981, a few years after the
federal government was compelled by a court order to start
supplying a small number of patients with cannabis under the
so-called
Compassionate Investigational New Drug (IND) Program, the
Georgia congressman introduced
a bill “to provide for the therapeutic use of marihuana in
situations involving life-threatening or sense-threatening
illnesses and to provide adequate supplies of marihuana for such
use.” That bill never passed, but similar ones did at the state
level. They typically did not amount to much because obtaining a
legal supply of marijuana proved impractical.

It is not clear how Cuomo plans to overcome that obstacle.
New
York’s law instructs the Department of Health to seek “an
investigational new drug permit” from the Food and Drug
Administration (FDA), meaning that legislators imagined the medical
marijuana program would proceed with the federal government’s
blessing. It says the commissioner of health “shall obtain
 marijuana through whatever means he deems most appropriate,
consistent with regulations promulgated by the National Institute
on Drug Abuse,  the Food and Drug Administration and the Drug
Enforcement Administration.” If proceeding with federal approval is
not feasible, the law says, the commissioner shall conduct an
inventory of available sources” including “the New York State
Police  Bureau of Criminal Investigation and local law
enforcement officials.”

The Times notes that “state and federal laws prohibit
growing marijuana, even for medical uses,” so “New York will have
to find an alternative supply of cannabis.” It cites unidentified
officials as saying “the likely sources could include the federal
government or law enforcement agencies.” The only source of
marijuana that is authorized by federal law is the crop grown at
the University of Mississippi for the National Institute on Drug
Abuse (NIDA). That is the source of cannabis for the federal IND
program, which the first Bush administration closed to new patients
in 1992. In the unlikely event that NIDA agrees to share its pot,
which would require approval from the FDA and the DEA, the program
contemplated by Cuomo would be legal. But if he instead tries to
use marijuana seized by “law enforcement agencies,” as the
Times suggests, he would be violating federal law.
Likewise if the state tried to grow its own crop.

These schemes would violate the Controlled Substances Act in a
way that merely exempting the medical use of marijuana from state
penalties does not, because state officials would be directly
involved in supplying marijuana. That is not the case in any of the
states that currently allow medical use of cannabis, where
cultivation and distribution are handled by private parties. At the
same time, relatively few patients would benefit from Cuomo’s
plan.

The Antonio G. Olivieri Controlled Substance Therapeutic
Research Program, named after a former New York City councilman and
state legislator who used marijuana to relieve the side effects of
cancer chemotherapy before dying from a brain tumor in 1980, is
“limited to cancer patients, glaucoma patients and patients
afflicted with other diseases as such diseases are approved by the
commissioner [of health].” The Times says Cuomo’s plan
would “allow just 20 hospitals across the state to prescribe
marijuana to patients with cancer, glaucoma or other diseases that
meet standards to be set by the New York State Department of
Health.” Those rules are far stricter than the criteria used by
states such as California and Colorado; the initial list of
qualifying conditions is even shorter than the one used
in New
Jersey, which has one of the country’s strictest medical
marijuana laws. In short, Cuomo is planning a medical marijuana
program that will be strictly limited but will probably violate
federal law if it happens at all. 

The Times notes that “medical marijuana bills have
passed the State Assembly four times—most recently in 2013—only to
stall in the Senate, where a group of breakaway Democrats shares
leadership with Republicans, who have traditionally been lukewarm
on the issue.” Hence Cuomo “has decided to bypass the Legislature
altogether.” Whether he can actually do that remains to be
seen.

If
you spend any significant amount of time talking to conservative
activists who oppose Obamacare, you’ll eventually hear some variant
on the theory that Obamacare was never meant to work. Instead, it
was meant to destroy the existing health care system, and in the
process pave the way for liberals to step in with the comprehensive
health care fix the far left has always really longed for: single
payer. 

There’s often a hint of conspiracy surrounding the accusation,
as if President Obama and the White House senior staff had hatched
some meticulous plot to spend a year struggling to pass a health
care law that they intended to fail in a series of carefully
planned disasters sometime down the road, which would create the
perfect opening for their true, secret goal.

I’ve always thought the notion was rather far fetched. Obamacare
was a stalking horse for a modified version of Obamacare, not a
single payer conspiracy scheme. But The New Republic’s
Noam Scheiber suggests that conservative activists worried that
Obamacare will lead to single payer might be at least partially
onto something—maybe not in their belief that Obamacare was
explicitly designed as a gateway to single payer, but in their
worry that the health law will eventually lead to some sort of
nationalized health system. And unlike those concerned conservative
activists,
Scheiber thinks this is a good thing.

The gist of Scheiber’s theory (delivered in response to
a griping Michael Moore op-ed about the health law  in

The New York Times) is that the law will create a
unified, organized constituency for change. Private coverage in the
exchanges will be too expensive for many, and dealing with private
insurers will upset some beneficiaries. That will make existing
government run health insurance options more attractive. “By
pooling millions of people together in one institutional home—the
exchanges where customers buy insurance under Obamacare—the
Affordable Care Act is creating an organized constituency for
additional reform,” he writes.

I don’t doubt that as Obamacare’s flaws continues to be exposed,
liberals like Scheiber, as well as a some Democratic legislators
and even presidential candidates, will push for a single payer
overhaul. But I don’t think it’s likely to happen in the forseeable
future.

For one thing, it assumes that irritation with Obamacare—a law
designed and implemented exclusively by Democrats—will somehow
generate public support for additional Democratic health
legislation that is even more sweeping. But judging by the beating
Democrats have taken at the polls over last few months, public
frustrations with Obamacare turn the electorate
toward Republicans. Democrats won’t be given a second chance,
with a mandate to do even more.

Scheiber’s theory also overlooks how tough passage of Obamacare
was in the first place—and how much support the administration had
to get from health industry stakeholders in order to eke out a
legislative victory. Single payer would be even tougher. Moderate
Democrats who were nervous about Obamacare the first time around
would be even less likely to support single payer, especially given
how the law
cost Democrats at the voting booth. And there’s no way that
doctors, insurers, hospitals, and other major health industry
groups would play nice with a single-payer push. Quite the
opposite: Even beyond the insurers, much of the industry would see
single-payer as a de facto nationalization of the health system,
and they would fight the transition with everything they could
muster.

Finally, Scheiber’s argument rests on the odd idea that
individuals with private coverage will become jealous of people
with Medicare and Medicaid.

I might be willing to believe that some people would prefer
Medicare to private coverage, but Medicaid isn’t going to become a
consumer favorite any time soon. Here’s Scheiber:

There’s the likelihood that, one day soon, especially if
Medicaid becomes more generous, the working-class person who makes
175% of the poverty level will look at his working-class neighbor
making 130% of the poverty level and think, wow, his
health insurance seems a lot better than my private Obamacare
plan.

That’s some rather wishful thinking. For starters, Medicaid
isn’t likely to become more generous: State budgets are already
straining under the burden of Medicaid spending, and the federal
budget squeeze means that it’s more likely that the federal share
of the program
will be cut back. Meanwhile, it’s hard to imagine someone with
private health insurance looking jealously at a program that has

no statistically significant effect on physical health
outcomes, and that has even been found, in a
couple of narrow instances, to produce health outcomes that are
worse than no insurance at all.

Might Obamacare lead to a handful of state-level experiments
with single-payer variants? Possibly,
although that mostly means that very liberal states with heavily
consolidated insurance markets will explicitly transform their
insurance industries into public utilities. 

There’s a weird overlap between conservative fears and liberal
hopes when it comes to single payer: Both seem to think that
Obamacare makes a universal government-run system more likely. But
both are wrong.

Zimbabwe used to be a breadbasket for much of
southern Africa. In 2000, the country’s long-time dictator Robert
Mugabe ordered the farms of white farmers be seized and divvied up
among his cronies.
Corn production fell from 2.148 million tons to 500,000 tons in
2002 and was 800,000 tons in 2013.
Wheat production fell from 255,000 tons to 150,000 tons in 2002
and was 25,000 tons in 2013. As a result, the country has had to
import grain to prevent famine several times. This year Zimbabwe
will have to
import 150,000 tons of corn to forestall staravation among 2.2
million Zimbabweans. 

Mugabe has followed to near perfection the recipe for producing
poverty that I laid out in my 2002 article. “Poor
Planning.”

Some recipes guaranteed to get lean results

Here, then, is a short guide for kleptocrats and egalitarians
who want to keep their countries poor. All of these policies have
stood the test of time as techniques for creating and maintaining
poverty. The list is by no means exhaustive, but it will give
would-be political leaders a good idea of how to start their
countries on the road to ruin.

First, make sure that your country’s money is no good.
Print money like there’s no tomorrow. Hyperinflation is one of the
easiest and most popular ways to dismantle an economy. Another
popular monetary gambit is to make sure your currency is not
convertible. This guarantees that no one will ever want to invest
in your country.

To further discourage investment, be sure to nationalize all
major Industries. Nationalization has additional
poverty-enhancing benefits. For example, it will ensure that the
nationalized industries never improve technologically or become
more efficient, and it makes workers pathetically dependent on
their political masters, namely you.

Of course, you may find it too tiresome to nationalize
everything, in which case it is very important that you
establish high tariffs that insulate your country’s
remaining private industries (usually owned by your cronies anyway)
from competition.

In addition, your legal system should make it nearly
impossible for anyone to license a new business, however
small. This will offer opportunities for your bureaucrats to make a
living through corruption and will protect your cronies from
domestic competition. An added advantage is that most commerce will
be made illegal and subject to arbitrary enforcement.

This leads to the point that property is critical.
Once people start to own something, they invest in it
and improve it, leading inexorably to the creation of wealth.
Again, the legal system can help to make it impossible to issue
clear titles so that your citizens can’t buy, sell, or borrow
against their “property.” Also, force your farmers to sell
their crops to government commodity boards at below-market
rates. This will discourage them from investing in anything more
advanced than subsistence agriculture, and you will be able to sell
whatever crops you do seize at low prices to keep the urban
populations quiet.

Another popular policy is confiscatory taxes. This strategy,
which allows you to claim that you are soaking the rich in the name
of equity, has long been fashionable among the genteelly stagnating
economies of Europe.

Finally, you may have missed the golden age of international
graft, when the World Bank and even commercial banks showered the
governments of poor countries with loans. But if the opportunity
arises, you should follow in the footsteps of two deceased leaders
whose fortunes are now being divvied up in “Please
Help”
spams: Zairean dictator Mobutu Sese Seko and Nigerian General
Sani Abacha. Take a page from their book by redirecting
international loans directly to your Swiss bank
accounts, sticking your citizens with the bill.

In other news, it is rumored that the nearly 90 year-old Mugabe
may have “collapsed.”