Author: admin

Yesterday the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
(CDC) released
survey data that show cigarette smoking by teenagers continued
to fall last year even as their use of electronic cigarettes
continued to rise. Between 2011 and 2013, according to the National
Youth Tobacco Survey, the prevalence of “current” (past-month)
cigarette smoking among high school students fell from 15.8 percent
to 12.7 percent, while the prevalence of current e-cigarette use
tripled from 1.5 percent to 4.5 percent. This is not what you would
expect to see if the rising popularity of e-cigarettes stimulated
demand for the conventional kind, as CDC officials repeatedly have
warned might happen.   

Last year, for instance, CDC Director Tom Frieden
said “many teens who start with e-cigarettes may be condemned
to struggling with a lifelong addiction to nicotine and
conventional cigarettes.” In April he
worried that e-cigarettes will “get another generation of kids
more hooked on nicotine and more likely to smoke cigarettes.” A
month later Tim McAfee, director of the CDC’s Office on Smoking and
Health,
condemned the marketing of e-cigarettes as an “egregious
experiment” on “our children.”

The CDC’s discussion of the latest data is a bit more
restrained. “Although the long-term impact of e-cigarette use on
public health overall remains uncertain,” says an
article in the agency’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly
Report, “the 2014 Surgeon General’s report found that
nicotine use can have adverse effects on adolescent brain
development; therefore, nicotine use by youths in any form (whether
combustible, smokeless, or electronic) is unsafe.” Maybe so, but
some forms of nicotine—in particular, the ones that involve
inhaling tobacco smoke—are decidely more unsafe than others. If
teenagers who otherwise would be smoking are vaping instead, that
should count as a public health improvement. In any case, the
unverified risk that e-cigarettes might serve as a “gateway” to
smoking should not be accepted as a valid reason for restricting
adult smokers’ access to a product that can dramatically reduce the
health hazards they face.

I have praised
and
lamented Esquire (a magazine I pay to receive,
and mostly quite like) for its political coverage in the past, but
the overriding spirit that makes its political journalism generally
its worst aspect is that it tends to treat politicians and politics
with a thoughtless
spirit of veneration, one expressed not only unquestioningly on
the part of the writer, but as if the writer can’t imagine that any
reader would question it.

A huge feature in its November issue (featuring Sexiest Woman
Alive, so-called, Penelope Cruz who stars in a
bizarrely misconceived story that mixes profiling her with some
superdated and unenlightening coverage of a bullfight, whose
symbolic power is somehow believed to still pulsate decades
post-Hemingway) by Mark Warren is called “Help,
We’re in a Living Hell and Don’t Know How to Get Out.”

The “we” are dozens of members of the House and Senate that they
interviewed; in a perfect Esquire touch, they reveal
that they actually started off trying to get tough with
politicians, who they generally can’t
help but love, and not even generally in a purely partisan way.
But:

I had initially planned to ask for no more than ten minutes of
their time, basically just to ask them why they were so bad at
their job, but fairly quickly it became obvious that these were
going to be richer and deeper conversations than I had bargained
for. And along the way, something unexpected happened: I became
less angry and more sympathetic to the thresher that all of these
people find themselves caught in. They are not whining. They are
crying for help. After only a few interviews, I stopped asking,
“Why are you so bad at your job?” because it occurred to me that it
was a cheap question, the kind of question that’s not interested in
an answer, which is just the sort of cultural deformity that got us
into this mess. It’s a terrible job, being in Congress in 2014.

And so the story became, for thousands of words, with lots of
different politicians’ voices across party lines, a lament about
how politicians can’t get things done. The story is
surprisingly lacking in any discussion of what must or should be
done; perhaps they think that all right-thinking, watch-wearing
Esquire readers all agree, but it’s a little disconcerting
to have a often thoughtful magazine write thousands of words about
our alleged political crisis with so little content. (Except they
seem to agree with politicians that it’s sad they have to raise
money all the time, and sad that other people are permitted to
raise money against them, apparently thinking it a given
that all incumbents should be re-elected all the time with no
effort, which would tend to be the result of a moneyless
politics.)

You learn a lot about some specific other congresspeople their
colleagues are willing to go on record slamming—Harry Reid and Ted
Cruz most prominent—and how the filibuster is obstructionist, and
how people holding up votes is bad, and how it’s bad that some
congressmen don’t move their families to D.C. because it cuts their
time to GOVERN!!!

But there’s no real hint of why any of it matters or why it’s an
unalloyed good that our legislators need to legislate more, or
longer, or more successfully (except that some executive or
judicial branch appointments aren’t being made efficiently
enough).

It’s an annoying but all too prevalent centrist view of
government: c’mon, let’s get over partisanship, ideology, what
people might want, what is just or efficient or affordable–we’ve
got this really big, enormous, cool, expensive government—it
needs to govern more!

And do so with what Warren calls “humility and civility” but
it’s clear he doesn’t mean humility about their power, but
merely humility in dealing with their colleagues, who, claims Sen.
Patrick Leahy with little credibility, in the old days would never
have “dreamed of giving your word and not keeping it” which
apparently certain villains now do, though he doesn’t say who or
about what.

 And all reasonable people are supposed to nod,
and purse their lips, and say, dammit, they may be Republican, they
may be Democrat, they may be from the north or the south, but they
are legislators and it’s a damn shame they don’t
legislate more. 

At
a Beijing news conference, President Barack Obama called a new
China-United States climate deal a “historic agreement.” But there
are two problems with treating the deal as big news, argues David
Harsanyi: 1) we’re not really doing anything we weren’t going to do
anyway, and 2) neither is China.

Specifically, though, the United States pledges to impede its
own economic growth right now, in significant ways, while China
will be free to continue building coal-powered plants, expand its
economy, and cement its place as the world’s leading
polluter—perhaps even doubling its output against ours. Until 2030,
that is, or some year around that time, when China’s carbon
emissions are expected to peak. Specifics aren’t
important. The agreement contains no binding language
requiring any goals to be met. But in around 15 years, the
Chinese promise that they will implement some vague action plan.
All we need to do is trust them.  

View this article.

• The House has voted to approve
  construction of the
  KeystoneXL pipeline, the ninth time it has done so. Whether it
  will make it through the Senate, still controlled by Democrats
  until January, is another question.
• A Dallas-area school teacher was formally fired by the school
  board last night for racially charged
  tweets about the Ferguson shooting, which called her critics
  “crackers” and suggested they kill themselves.
• Chicago’s first female mayor,
  Jane Byrne, has died at the age of 80.
• The American Civil Liberties Union is suing the Army on behalf
  of a
  practicing Sikh applicant who is not being permitted to wear a
  turban or grow his hair out as his religion requires.
• Sweden reports a
  foreign submarine trespassed within its waters but couldn’t say
  for certain which country it was from. The country did pick up a
  radio call in Russian, but the country denies any involvement.
• The United Kingdom has announced it will be cancelling the
  passports of citizens who
  travel abroad to join ISIS.
• 
  “Uranus might be full of surprises.” I guarantee you that
  headline writer knew exactly what he or she was
  doing.

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content.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky) gave a
strong signal today that he intends to try to keep surveillance and
National Security Agency (NSA) reform in the news. His office has
told beltway media that Paul will not support the Senate version of
the USA Freedom Act, a legislative effort to scale back the massive
expansion of surveillance against American citizens exposed by
Edward Snowden. The problem is that the proposals have been watered
down too much. From
The Hill:

“Sen. Paul does not feel that the current NSA reforms go far
enough,” the aide said in an email.

“There are significant problems with the bill, the most
notable being an extension of the Patriot Act through December
2017.”

The USA Freedom Act, which the Senate will take up next week,
would end the NSA’s bulk collection of metadata about Americans’
phone calls, among other changes. Metadata includes the numbers
people dial as well as the length and frequency of their calls, but
not the actual content of their conversations.

Crucially for Paul, however, the bill also
reauthorizes until the end of 2017 key portions of the
Patriot Act set to expire next June.

The Hill says Paul may also push for a measure to allow
Americans to sue the NSA and other federal agencies.

Though the Senate bill has been watered down from its initial
intent, it’s not as terrible as what has become of the House
version of the bill. J.D. Tuccille wrote about the differences
between the two versions of the bill
here. There’s some American Civil Liberties Union analysis of
the legislation and some reluctant support
here.

It
took five months
for Florida mother Sarah Markham to regain custody of her new
son after the state removed the baby for being briefly
underweight.

The ordeal
started last June, when Markham took her 12-day-old son to a
doctor and found he was dehydrated and had lost 10 percent of his
weight. This is not uncommon for newborns. The pediatrician told
Markham she would need to start supplementing the boy’s breastfed
diet with a milk-based baby formula.

Markham had no problem with adding formula, but as a Seventh Day
Adventist, for whom a vegetarian or vegan diet is a part of
religious beliefs, she didn’t want to feed her son a milk-based
product. Upon telling this to the doctor, he ordered her to take
the baby to the hospital, where staff could give the infant the
dairy formula.

Markham instead went to Whole Foods, bought a soy-based baby
formula to supplement her son’s diet, and contacted another doctor
for a second opinion—not exactly the actions of someone willfully
neglecting their child’s health. In fact, Markham was feeding her
son the new formula when local police showed up to place her under
arrest. 

It seems that when Markham didn’t show up at the hospital, her
doctor had called the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office. Police
officers arrived at Markham’s apartment, arrested her for “child
neglect without bodily harm”, and handed her son over to the
Seminole Child Protective Services. Markham “was accused of
refusing to give her infant non-vegan formula even though he was
dehydrated,” ABC News reports, as if dairy-based formula has some
sort of magical hydrating properties that soy-based formula does
not. 

So for the “good” of this newborn baby, he was separated from
his mother for the first five months of his life. (The kid may wind
up with an attachment disorder, but hey, at least he was spared the
indignities of hydrating on breast milk and soy-based baby
formula!). Markham finally regained custody of her son Wednesday,
after a judge threw out the Seminole County Child Protective
Services’ claims. As a condition of the child’s return, Markham
must now meet regularly with a state-approved
pediatrician.