Month: March 2017

A Southern California mom, Diandra Toyos, believes that when she, her mom, and her three young kids were shopping at Ikea, they were stalked by two men aiming to “traffic” the children. She wrote a Facebook post about it that went viral.

Of course it did. It had everything that’s irresistibly sharable: A feisty mom, an evil dude or two, “Swedish” (that is, Chinese) furniture, and the sex trafficking of pre-pubescent children.

What’s not to like?

So, after the zillionth person sent me the link, I wrote about it in The New York Post. As I pointed out, the mom’s proof of her children’s near doom was this: “Something was off. We knew it in our gut. I am almost sure that we were the targets of human trafficking.”

And I am almost sure they were not. Of course, if she felt uncomfortable, there was no reason not to skedaddle. But on Facebook she was telling other moms to be ultra-careful because, “this is happening all over,” with no basis in fact:

Or, as I put it on my Free-Range Kids blog: “Pointlessly terrified mom warns other moms to be pointlessly terrified.”

How dare I make light of such a serious situation? After all, mothers are gushing thanks for the post: “a great reminder that this kind of stuff can happen,” wrote someone on Westchester Moms.

The praise is piling on — “Outstanding advice,” “Good information!” — just as it did last week, when a very similar post went viral by a mom who thought kidnappers were about to snatch her baby out of her arms as she waited in line at the grocery store. (But she stared them down. Who knew kidnappers are such cream puffs?)

My point is not to make fun of the folks freaking out. My point is to try to give us all a reality check: Come on — two men are going to grab three kids, all under age 7, IN PUBLIC, in a camera-filled store, with the MOM and the GRANDMA right there, not to mention a zillion other fans of moderately priced furnishings?

Can we please take a deep breath and realize how insanely unlikely that is? How we don’t need to be “warned” about this because NOTHING HAPPENED!

Of course, Reason readers know that you can tell nothing happened because the whole thing was described as an “incident.” My #1 Rule of Reporting is: When something is called an “incident,” it’s because nothing happened.

How unlikely was this crime? I asked David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire. He told me (via email):

“Child abduction rarely occurs in a crowded public venue like that, where help would be easy to muster. [Moreover] most sex-trafficking lures and abductions are of teenagers. Parents should spend their worry time on other perils.”

So why don’t they? The answer is in Diandra’s own warning. She wrote that she’d recently read the story of yet another mom who said she and her kids had been targeted at (ironically!) Target. “I’m reading more and more about these experiences, and it’s terrifying.”

People are posting scary stories on Facebook that make parents paranoid, to the point where THEY post scary posts, which inspires MORE paranoia and scary posts.

That’s exactly it: People are posting scary stories on Facebook that make parents paranoid, to the point where THEY post scary posts, which inspires MORE paranoia and scary posts, etc. etc.

What’s worse, the effect is resonating far beyond the Facebook comment section. It is changing parenting — and childhood.

When we are warned over and over that our kids are in constant danger, even in the safest situations, we start to believe it.

From there it’s just a baby step to childhood on lockdown, never letting our kids walk to school, arresting the parents who let their kids play in the park, smashing the window of the car in front of the dry cleaners, because the mom left the child napping there for three minutes. We will not tolerate parents who trust their kids and trust the odds.

Instead, gripped by hysteria, we are giving our children a childhood unlike our own — a childhood with no freedom at all — simply because someone pressed “share.”

For more on misplaced paranoia about child kidnappings at IKEA, read Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown.

“In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes,” quipped Benjamin Franklin. For now both remain inevitable, but two exciting new studies suggest that the grim reaper might be put off by novel treatments that can slow and even reverse aging.

Senescent cells accumulate as we grow older, secreting inflammatory substances that harm neighboring cells and contribute to many age-related diseases, including atherosclerorsis and diabetes. Researchers associated with Erasmus University report that they have developed a compound that selectively kills off senescent cells while leaving healthy ones alone. Eliminating senescent cells restored stamina, fur density, and kidney function in aged mice. The researchers report that they are continuing to study the rodents to see if the treatment extends their lifespans. “Maybe when you get to 65 you’ll go every five years for your anti-senescence shot in the clinic. You’ll go for your rejuvenation shot,” speculated one researcher.

As we age, our cells lose their ability to repair the damage to the DNA that makes up our genes. Another team of researchers associated with Harvard University are reporting experiments that increase levels of a compound that restores DNA repair activity back to youthful levels.

View this article.

For a week in 1983, life took a dark turn in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. Over the course of five episodes of Mister Rogers, a mixture of miscommunication and anxiety convinced King Friday that another neighborhood nearby was stockpiling weapons. The king then ordered a major arms buildup himself, diverting money from the education budget and issuing an order to “conscript everyone in the neighborhood to help put the bombs together.” Some of the other characters were willing to go along with this. (“King Friday wouldn’t have us doing anything that was going to hurt anybody. He’s always trying to keep people safe!” said X the Owl. “We shouldn’t call them ‘bombs,’ though. We should call them ‘surprise treats’ or something like that.”). But the orders did prompt some dissent from Lady Elaine Fairchilde, here as always the puppet most likely to call bullshit on King Friday. The tensions kept ramping up, with gas masks and air raid drills, until Lady Elaine and Lady Aberlin discerned that the other neighborhood had actually been building a bridge, not bombs.

This comment on the arms race aired the same month as The Day After, a TV movie about a nuclear war. There was a big wave of worry about whether that film was too scary for children to see, and there were rumors that the Mister Rogers storyline was conceived as an alternative to The Day After for young audiences. In fact it had been conceived separately and the timing was a coincidence.

Eventually the episodes were withdrawn from rotation. But this month the first two installments of the sequence turned up on YouTube, leading to what may be my all-time favorite Daily Beast headline:

The article below that headline concedes that it is unlikely these were posted to protest the president’s proposed arms buildup. Though I must admit I kind of like the idea that someone is trying to communicate with the White House by quietly adding old episodes of children’s television to YouTube.

Anyway. After word spread that these were online, the copyright cadres swung into action and YouTube took them down. (Which is odd, since plenty of other old Mister Rogers episodes are on the site.) Someone else has reposted them, and I’m embedding that video below; the two Neighborhood of Make-Believe sequences start at the 16:19 and 42:09 marks. Watch ’em while you can:

I can’t show you parts three through five, but you can read summaries of them here, here, and here. Incidentally, the episodes embedded above also include some lessons about banks and mints. These spill in to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe story when King Friday gets his treasurer Mr. Newmoney on the phone and inquires about how much cash is available for war production.

(For past editions of the Friday A/V Club, go here.)

Q: What kind of tax hike can 21^st century Republicans get behind?

A: One that pays for a border wall, and can be sold, inaccurately, as an “Illegal Immigrant Tax.”

Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) yesterday introduced the Border Wall Funding Act, imposing what he describes as a “2% fee on remittances sent south of the border.” The bill has yet to be posted online as far as I can tell, but according to The Plainsman of Auburn the tax would apply to monies sent to “more than 40 Latin American countries.” Rogers’s sales pitch: “This bill is simple – anyone who sends their money to countries that benefit from our porous borders and illegal immigration should be responsible for providing some of the funds needed to complete the wall. This bill keeps money in the American economy, and most importantly, it creates a funding stream to build the wall.”

Traditionally, nationalistic controls on capital flows have not been associated with liberal democracy and the rule of law. According to a skeptical analysis published last week by the World Bank, other countries currently considering such a levy include “Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia…and the United Arab Emirates.” Previous efforts in Gabon (2008) and Palau (2013), “have not worked,” World Bank author Dilip Ratha asserted, because the “tax collections were found to be insignificant.”

As Nick Gillespie pointed out a year ago, after then-candidate Donald Trump proposed cracking down on remittances to pay for his wall, the idea is fundamentally corrupted by “the assumption that the government has the right to unilaterally stop people from spending the money they earn and possess; that the feds have a right to tell you where you can and cannot go or even send checks.” That has not stopped the likes of National Review from editorially endorsing such a nationwide tax.

The United States is by far the leading source of remittances in the world, with its residents sending to other countries $135 billion in 2015, some 23 percent of the global total, according to research published this month by the international banking conglomerate BBVA. Monies sent to Latin America and the Caribbean accounted for 38.5% of the U.S. total, BBVA estimated, led by Mexico ($27 billion, or more than the country’s annual oil revenue), then Guatemala ($7 million) and the Dominican Republic ($5 million). As a percentage of the host-countries’ GDP, however, Mexico’s 2.6 percent lags far behind Haiti (24.7 percent), Honduras (18.2 percent), and Jamaica (16.9 percent).

There is no reason to assume that the bulk of these funds derive from illegal immigrants. Of the 41 million or so foreign-born residents of the United States, an estimated 11 million are not authorized to be here, and are probably less likely than their legal brethren to use money conduits that are traceable by the feds. (And as any Cuban can tell you, there are plenty of U.S.-born hyphenated-Americans who wire money back to the island, further broadening the pool of donors, and again underscoring the truism that measures taken against illegal immigrants also pinch the freedom of natural-born citizens.) The money they send back is critical in ameliorating poverty and jump-starting economic activity. In other words, it helps create the kinds of conditions that may keep an increasing number of would-be migrants at home.

According to the World Bank analysis, “In 2016, migrant remittance flows to developing countries amounted to $440 billion, more than three times the size of official development aid flows. In many countries, remittances are the largest source of foreign exchange. In India and Mexico, they are larger than foreign direct investment; in Egypt, they are larger than the revenue from Suez Canal; and in Pakistan, they are larger than the country’s international reserves.”

For this reason, the G20, the global club of rich nations led by the United States, agreed in September 2014 on a “Plan to Facilitate Remittance Flows,” with the intention to reduce the worldwide average tax on remittances from 8 percent down to 5 percent. From that (jargon-flecked) document:

The Group of Twenty (G20) recognises the value of remittance flows in helping to drive strong, sustainable and balanced growth. Remittances represent a major source of income for millions of families and businesses globally, and are an important avenue to greater financial inclusion. For the poorest and most vulnerable, access to remittance flows provides a sustainable path out of poverty, as more than half the world’s adult population have limited access to finance. In 2014, remittances to developing countries are expected to reach $436 billion, far exceeding Official Development Assistance. Remittances to and from G20 countries account for almost 80 per cent of global remittance flows.

OK, so maybe a remittance tax is a philosophically suspect idea that hampers global anti-poverty efforts. Still, would it work? Preliminary studies and anecdotal behavior patterns point to no.

Candidate Trump’s somewhat convoluted plan from a year ago tying remittances to the wall involved basically threatening Mexico with such a tax in order to extract a lump-sum payment, and when that fails amend the Patriot Act to make wire transferrers prove their citizenship or else face taxes on their shipments. Though the idea faded, it was treated seriously enough that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released an exhaustive analysis that guesstimated the wide band of potential effects like this:

one scenario with no change in the amount of remittances and low administrative and enforcement costs could provide $0.41 billion in potential net revenue for border protection. In contrast, another scenario with a 75 percent reduction in remittances after the fine and high administrative and enforcement costs would generate potential net revenue of only $0.01 billion. In some cases, the cost incurred by CFPB could be more than the revenue from the fine.

So best-case scenario, $410 million in pocket change. That’s not much of a wall.

Granted, the 2 percent south-of-the-border remittance tax is a much broader and cleaner proposal, but it faces many of the same potential pitfalls, namely that only around half of money transfers as it is go through regulated channels, which means making that more expensive will drive more people to black market solutions like Bitcoin, as in Venezuela.

Republicans once believed as a matter of bedrock faith that the free flow of capital, goods, and humans across the southern border was the best way to produce the kind of economic development that depresses illegal border crossings. The loss of that faith, which predates the rise of Donald Trump, has been one of the most disturbing spectacles in American politics.

This week in ginned-up Donald Trump administration outrage that distracts from actual issues: The census will continue to not ask questions that they haven’t been asking about LGBT people. This in some quarters has been presented as some sort of LGBT “erasure.” It’s not.

At least when activists within the LGBT and progressive community freaked out about the possibility of an anti-gay executive order coming from President Donald Trump’s administration, there was actual documentation. It turned out that Trump was not interested in signing such an executive order and it never came to be. But at least there was smoke to be concerned about if not an actual fire.

Such is not the case with this week’s LGBT anti-Trump outrage, which turns out to fundamentally be less about gay and transgender rights and more about organizations who want a slice of the great federal spending pie.

To explain: The U.S. Census put out a proposal earlier in the week for questions it may ask during the 2020 census. Sexual orientation and gender identity were among the potential discussion topics. This was not something the Census had asked previously, which you know if you’ve participated in a census, ever.

Then, the Census quickly explained that it had not intended to include the questions about sexual orientation and gender identity this time and withdrew the topics. So the Census, which had never asked people if they were LGBT before, is not planning to ask in the 2020 Census either.

Cue the outrage. The first headline I saw came from Out Magazine, a top gay-targeted publication. The headline read “Trump Administration Omits LGBTQ People from the 2020 Census.” My initial reaction was “Woo hoo! I don’t have to participate in the census!” But even before reading I suspected that wasn’t what the story actually meant.

The Trump administration is not omitting LGBT people from the Census, and a writer actually analyzing how the announcement played out notes that the Trump administration might not have even played any role in the consideration of the questions at all. Even Snopes has gotten into the act with an explainer.

What actually happened is that the National LGBTQ Task Force, an activist group with an open, stated agenda of having these questions added to the Census, put out a press release declaring their unhappiness in seeing the questions get deleted. I don’t use “agenda” as a negative here, and I don’t necessarily see an issue with the Census asking people their orientations for demographic purposes, as long as it’s made very, very clear that answers are completely voluntary.

But there is a deliberately misplaced outrage here that wants to trick LGBT people into thinking that their rights and equal protection under the law is dependent on whether the federal government knows that they’re gay or transgender. This is a seriously unsettling proposition. Here’s a quote from Meghan Maury, criminal and economic justice project director of the National LGBTQ Task Force:

“Today, the Trump Administration has taken yet another step to deny LGBTQ people freedom, justice, and equity, by choosing to exclude us from the 2020 Census and American Community Survey. LGBTQ people are not counted on the Census—no data is collected on sexual orientation or gender identity. Information from these surveys helps the government to enforce federal laws like the Violence Against Women Act and the Fair Housing Act and to determine how to allocate resources like housing supports and food stamps. If the government doesn’t know how many LGBTQ people live in a community, how can it do its job to ensure we’re getting fair and adequate access to the rights, protections and services we need?”

What does demographic inclusion in a study have to do with whether LGBT people are treated equally under the law? Nothing. The Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage, for example, is a ruling precedent that makes it clear that rights and privileges extended by the government are to apply equally. It doesn’t actually matter how many gay marriages there are (which, interestingly enough, is the one area that will be counted in the Census). Rights and freedoms are not based on head counts or a demographic analysis of where people live.

This isn’t about rights. It’s about money. This is about organizations and activists who are hoping to use this demographic data to get a bigger slice of federal funding. And that’s infuriating. Even were I to accept that the federal government is a good mechanism for filtering money down to local charitable non-profits (and it’s typically not—check out the problems with Community Development Block Grants here), this is a clear attempt to try to use demographic-based funding as a replacement for funding mechanisms based on actual customer bases.

Using myself as an example: I’m a gay man living in Los Angeles. I am fortunate enough (thanks to Reason’s many supporters) to live comfortably enough to not need these government welfare or health services. But if these services could include me demographically as a potential customer then they could lobby for more money. That I might never set foot in these places is not relevant. These are organizations that serve gay people, and I’m a gay person, so give them money.

Imagine if public schools could get funding based on how many school-age children live in their district instead of actual attendance? The corrupt consequences would make the school system an even bigger disaster than it is now. They would care less about outcomes. They would care less if students even went to school.

This incident of phony outrage is particularly offensive because it takes the goals of certain social and political organizations with agendas that not all LGBT people share and attempts to argue that this is a mechanism to protect our rights and freedoms. And furthermore, they’re arguing that we should be giving up our privacy as gay people in order to do so! Maybe ask some Japanese-Americans how that worked out for them during World War II? (Spoiler: It didn’t end so well.)

Missing and abducted children have been a big news topic lately, spurred by a host of high-profile conspiracy-theories and falsehoods that began slithering their way through social media. A casual observer could be forgiven for thinking we’re in the midst of a child-abduction epidemic. But the truth is that American children today are no more likely to be kidnapped than they were decades ago, and much more likely to be returned safely when they are.

According to an estimate from the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), there were just 105 “stereotypical kidnappings” in America between late 2010 and late 2011, the last period for which we have data. (For reference, there were about 73.9 million children in America that year.) Just 65 of these kidnappings were committed by strangers. Less than half involved the abduction of a child under age 12. Only 14 percent of cases were still open after one week, and 92 percent of victims were recovered or returned alive.

In the previous OJJDP survey, from the late 1900s, there had been an estimated 115 stereotypical kidnappings and just 60 percent of victims made it home.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) defines stereotypical kidnappings as those in which 1) the victim is under 18-years-old, 2) the kidnapper is either a stranger or a “slight acquaintance,” 3) the abduction involves moving the victim at least 20 feet or detaining them for at least one hour, and 4) the victim is either held for ransom, transported at least 50 miles, detained overnight, held with an intent to keep permanently, or killed. In other words, these are “the most serious” sorts of child abductions, as DOJ puts it.

However, not all of the 105 cases in this category are quite as stereotypical or serious as the others. DOJ defines slight acquaintance as someone the child or their family have known for less than six months, someone they’ve known for longer than six months but see less than once per month, or someone who might be recognizable to a child or their parents but not known by name. In one “stereotypical kidnapping” case DOJ highlights, a 16-year-old girl ran away to live with an adult boyfriend, who is defined as a “slight acquaintance” because she had only been seeing him a few months. So the number of stereotypical kidnappings that the general public would consider stereotypical is actually lower than the feds’ estimate.

Both the 2011 and the 1997 data come from the National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway, and Thrownaway Children (NISMART). By surveying law-enforcement agencies in a representative sample of U.S. counties, OJJDP came up with estimates for the prevalence and characteristics of stereotypical kidnapping overall during the study periods. The latest NISMART survey covers incidents that occurred between October 1, 2010, and September 20, 2011. The previous survey covers incidents that occured in 1997. Here’s an overview of what the federal surveys found.

Number of “stereotypical kidnappings” in America, October 2010 – September 2011: 105

• perpetrated by strangers: 65
• perpetrated by slight acquaintances: 40

Are stereotypical kidnappings up or down? Down, maybe—there were 115 incidents defined as stereotypical kidnappings in the ’90s NISMART survey, compared to 105 in more recent research. But because these estimates are based in part on weighted data, the DOJ considers the two numbers “statistically equivalent.” However, 2010-2011 victims were much more likely to make it home safely than their 1990s counterparts. In the 90s survey, only 60 percent of stereotypical kidnapping cases ended with the child being recovered alive. In the 2010-2011 survey, it was 92 percent.

Ages of victims: More than half of stereotypical kidnapping victims in 2010-2011 were ages 12 or above. In total, an estimated 61 victims were between 12- and 17-years-old. An estimated 19 victims were between 6- and 11-years-old, with 11 victims between ages three and five and around 14 that were two-years-old or younger.

Race, ethnicity, and gender of victims: Most of the stereotypical kidnapping victims from the more recent survey—approximately 81 percent—were female. Girls ages 12-17 accounted for about half of all victims, with girls age 11 or younger accounting for another 30 percent. About 12 percent of victims were boys age 11 or younger. Nearly two-thirds (61 percent) of victims from 2010-11 were white, 31 percent were black, and about 24 percent were (white or black) Hispanic. In the 1997 survey, 74 percent of stereotypical-kidnapping victims were white and 19 percent were black, with eight percent identified as Hispanic.

Race, ethnicity, and gender of perpetrators: Three quarters of perpetrators were male, and nearly three quarters were between 18- and 35-years-old. The remaining perpetrators were mostly between the ages of 36 and 45. Around 44 percent were white, 45 percent black, and 18 percent were Hispanic. Relatively few cases (17 percent) involved more than one kidnapper.

Where and how do stereotypical kidnappings occur? About 32 percent of those abducted were taken from a place where they were living or staying (their home, a relative’s home, a homeless shelter, etc.). Another 32 percent were abducted at the kidnapper’s home. The final 36 percent of victims were taken from a public place of some sort. Most cases featured only one victim (81 percent) and only 18 percent of cases involved a child taken from a group of two or more children. In nearly two-thirds of the abductions, the victims voluntarily went with kidnappers at first.

What happens to victims after they’re abducted? In 66 percent of stereotypical kidnapping cases, a perpetrator used force or threats to detain their victim(s). About 37 cases involved physical abuse, 66 cases involved sexual abuse, and 25 cases involved neglect. Some 17 cases were suspected to be related to sex trafficking, but did not necessarily involve sex trafficking.

In more than one third of the stereotypical kidnapping cases, victims were found or returned within 24 hours. In another 31 percent of incidents, the victim was found or returned within one to three days. Only 15 total cases dragged on for more than one week.