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Via Alan Vanneman
comes a link to this NY Times story about cities bulldozing blight
rather than trying to rehab it. A snippet:

Large-scale destruction is well known in Detroit, but it is also
underway in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Buffalo
and others at a total cost of more than $250 million. Officials are
tearing down tens of thousands of vacant buildings, many habitable,
as they seek to stimulate economic growth, reduce crime and blight,
and increase environmental sustainability….

[M]ore than half of the nation’s 20 largest cities in 1950 have
lost at least one-third of their populations. And since 2000, a
number of cities, including Baltimore, St. Louis, Pittsburgh,
Cincinnati and Buffalo, have lost around 10 percent; Cleveland has
lost more than 17 percent; and more than 25 percent of residents
have left Detroit, whose bankruptcy declaration this summer has
heightened anxiety in other postindustrial cities….

At least one city that has taken a pioneering approach to
confronting diminution has found that accepting shrinkage does not
mean problems go away. Youngstown, Ohio, once a bustling steel city
of 170,000 but now with only 66,000 people, has sought to head off
collapse by tearing down thousands of vacant houses — 3,000 so far
and 10 more each week.

Read the whole thing.

As someone who has lived in and spent time in shrinking cities
such as Buffalo and Cleveland, I understand the appeal – and quite
possibly the effectiveness – of clearing out huge swaths of vacated
land (that assumes, of course, that eminent domain powers are not
abused).

But if working on
Reason Saves Cleveland taught me one thing, it’s that there’s
no simple solution to urban decline. Some of it is simply
historical – the Northeast is not going to dominate American
business and culture that way it did 100 years ago and cities such
as Cleveland or Buffalo or Detroit will never regain their earlier
populations or the density at which they lived. Read
more on that topic here.

But it’s also clear that private and public sector boosters are
always more interested in laying big bets on giant development
deals that won’t transform a city or region even if they happen to
work out perfectly. What makes and keeps places livable and
attractive are the smaller-ticket items, such as quality of basic
services such as roads, law enforcement, business climate, schools,
taxes, and regulations. These aren’t sexy items but they are the
things that actually keep cities thriving.

Watch Reason TV’s #AnarchyinDetroit playlist to learn how
residents are taking their bankrupt city back, block by block:

The singer Lady Gaga told a local New York
morning radio DJ that she had been addicted to marijuana.
People first
reported:

“I have been addicted to it and it’s ultimately related
to anxiety coping and it’s a form of self-medication and I was
smoking up to 15-20 marijuana cigarettes a day with no tobacco,”
she said on Elvis Duran and The Z100 Morning Show. 

“I was living on a totally other psychedelic plane, numbing myself
completely, and looking back I do see now that some of it had to do
with my hip pain. I didn’t know where the pain was coming from
so I was just in a lot of pain and very depressed all the time and
not really sure why,” she said. 

Does it sound like maybe she was taking prescription pain pills
too?
Subsequent
reports don’t appear to mention it. Lady Gaga recently broke
her hip on stage, and at the end of the People write up of
the interview she’s quoted:

“The truth is that I can break, and I did. I was not
very good at breaking. I lost everything that I love. I
was in a wheelchair for six months. I did a lot of drugs and took a
lot of pills,” she admitted. 

But Gaga said she plans to “fight” her addiction, and challenge
herself to create music without the aid of mood-altering
substances. 

“I do put that pressure on myself; I have to be high to be
creative. I need that, that’s an error in my life that happened for
over 10 years. Can I be brilliant without it? I know that I can be
and I have to be because I want to live, and I want my fans to want
to live.” 

The Drug Policy Alliance
notes:

According to a federal Institute of Medicine study in
1999, fewer than 10 percent of those who try marijuana ever meet
the clinical criteria for dependence, while 32 percent of tobacco
users and 15 percent of alcohol users do. According to federal
data, marijuana treatment admissions referredT by the criminal
justice system rose from 48 percent in 1992 to 58 percent in 2006.
Just 45 percent of marijuana admissions met the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders criteria for marijuana
dependence. More than a third hadn’t used marijuana in the 30 days
prior to admission for treatment.

Drug courts are
often a paradox, trapping non-violent “offenders”with the
choice of being criminals or sick. The danger with comparing
marijuana to the perfectly legal tobacco and alcohol is the desire
of some authoritarians to
ban it all.

As Brian Doherty
noted about the feds characterizing spending on a purported
cure for marijuana addiction as something with a clear medical
need, “there is certainly a clear institutional need on the part of
the drug treatment industry, Big Pharma, and an American government
on all levels that is going to be more and more troubled by the
realities of human beings enjoying smoking a plant that hovers
between commodity, medicine, and menace.”

A review in the Washington Post,
incidentally, is not interested in Lady Gaga’s latest studio
effort, criticizing her for making statements about culture only in
“the most cartoonishly broad strokes.” 

The Associated Press is
running a terrific and long investigative article, “The
Secret, Dirty Cost of Obama’s Green Power Push,” on the
environmental downsides of the ethanol fuel mandate. From the
AP…

…the ethanol era has proven far more damaging to the
environment than politicians promised and much worse than the
government admits today.

As farmers rushed to find new places to plant corn, they wiped
out millions of acres of conservation land, destroyed habitat and
polluted water supplies, an Associated Press investigation
found.

Five million acres of land set aside for conservation — more
than Yellowstone, Everglades and Yosemite National Parks combined —
have vanished on Obama’s watch.

Landowners filled in wetlands. They plowed into pristine
prairies, releasing carbon dioxide that had been locked in the
soil.

Sprayers pumped out billions of pounds of fertilizer, some of
which seeped into drinking water, contaminated rivers and worsened
the huge dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico where marine life can’t
survive.

The consequences are so severe that environmentalists and many
scientists have now rejected corn-based ethanol as bad
environmental policy. But the Obama administration stands by it,
highlighting its benefits to the farming industry rather than any
negative impact.

Farmers planted 15 million more acres of corn last year than
before the ethanol boom, and the effects are visible in places like
south central Iowa.

Besides these negative effects, it is doubtful that producing
corn ethanol has much, if any effect, on reducing the greenhouse
gas emissions that are thought to be contributing to man-made
global warming. Nevertheless, industry lobbyists fought hard to get
the EPA to jigger the numbers so that ethanol would look good in
this respect. As the AP explains:

Writing the regulations to implement the ethanol mandate was
among the administration’s first major environmental undertakings.
Industry and environmental groups watched closely.

The EPA’s experts determined that the mandate would increase
demand for corn and encourage farmers to plow more land.
Considering those factors, they said, corn ethanol was only
slightly better than gasoline when it came to carbon dioxide
emissions.

Sixteen percent better, to be exact. And not in the short term.
Only by 2022.

By law, though, biofuels were supposed to be at least 20 percent
greener than gasoline.

The AP reports that the EPA bowed to lobbyist pressure and
changed its assumptions, i.e., boosting its estimates of average
yields to 230 bushels per acre and corn prices leveling off at
$3.22 per bushel. In the 2013 bumper crop year, the U.S. Department
of  Agriculture estimates yields will be just over
160 bushels per acre and corn prices are currently around
$4.30 per bushel.

It is worth your while to read the entire depressing article.
For more background see my 2010 article about my
visit to an ethanol plant in Aberdeen, SD. Also see Reason
TV’s 2008 video in which I outline the harms of ethanol
subsidies below:

The Associated Press is
running a terrific and long investigative article, “The
Secret, Dirty Cost of Obama’s Green Power Push,” on the
environmental downsides of the ethanol fuel mandate. From the
AP…

…the ethanol era has proven far more damaging to the
environment than politicians promised and much worse than the
government admits today.

As farmers rushed to find new places to plant corn, they wiped
out millions of acres of conservation land, destroyed habitat and
polluted water supplies, an Associated Press investigation
found.

Five million acres of land set aside for conservation — more
than Yellowstone, Everglades and Yosemite National Parks combined —
have vanished on Obama’s watch.

Landowners filled in wetlands. They plowed into pristine
prairies, releasing carbon dioxide that had been locked in the
soil.

Sprayers pumped out billions of pounds of fertilizer, some of
which seeped into drinking water, contaminated rivers and worsened
the huge dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico where marine life can’t
survive.

The consequences are so severe that environmentalists and many
scientists have now rejected corn-based ethanol as bad
environmental policy. But the Obama administration stands by it,
highlighting its benefits to the farming industry rather than any
negative impact.

Farmers planted 15 million more acres of corn last year than
before the ethanol boom, and the effects are visible in places like
south central Iowa.

Besides these negative effects, it is doubtful that producing
corn ethanol has much, if any effect, on reducing the greenhouse
gas emissions that are thought to be contributing to man-made
global warming. Nevertheless, industry lobbyists fought hard to get
the EPA to jigger the numbers so that ethanol would look good in
this respect. As the AP explains:

Writing the regulations to implement the ethanol mandate was
among the administration’s first major environmental undertakings.
Industry and environmental groups watched closely.

The EPA’s experts determined that the mandate would increase
demand for corn and encourage farmers to plow more land.
Considering those factors, they said, corn ethanol was only
slightly better than gasoline when it came to carbon dioxide
emissions.

Sixteen percent better, to be exact. And not in the short term.
Only by 2022.

By law, though, biofuels were supposed to be at least 20 percent
greener than gasoline.

The AP reports that the EPA bowed to lobbyist pressure and
changed its assumptions, i.e., boosting its estimates of average
yields to 230 bushels per acre and corn prices leveling off at
$3.22 per bushel. In the 2013 bumper crop year, the U.S. Department
of  Agriculture estimates yields will be just over
160 bushels per acre and corn prices are currently around
$4.30 per bushel.

It is worth your while to read the entire depressing article.
For more background see my 2010 article about my
visit to an ethanol plant in Aberdeen, SD. Also see Reason
TV’s 2008 video in which I outline the harms of ethanol
subsidies below:

California’s new law
acknowledging transgendered students adds the following to the

state’s code:

“A pupil shall be permitted to participate in sex-segregated
school programs and activities, including athletic teams and
competitions, and use facilities consistent with his or her gender
identity, irrespective of the gender listed on the pupil’s
records.”

The concerned social conservative response can be summarized as
“OMG! Boys in the girls’ bathroom! And you can’t stop it!”
Opponents have used this tactic to get enough signatures to
possibly force Assembly Bill 1266 to a vote. From the
Associated Press:

A coalition of conservative groups called Privacy for all
Students submitted 620,000 signatures to get the initiative on the
November 2014 ballot, said Frank Schubert, the political strategist
handling the signature gathering effort.

To qualify, at least 505,000 valid signatures must be submitted.
To verify the signatures are real, each of California’s 58 counties
will first check that the count is correct, then conduct a random
sampling of signatures to make sure they are legitimate. After
that, it is likely the state would order a full review to ensure
the integrity of the signatures.

If, after all of the reviews, the group has the requisite number
of valid signatures, the initiative would qualify for the
ballot.

This fight has the potential to get really nasty. The Pacific Justice
Institute (not to be confused with the totally unrelated
liberty-minded Pacific Legal Foundation) caused a bit of a
shitstorm by targeting a single transgendered student at Florence
High School in Florence, Colo., claiming the biologically male
student was “making sexually harassing comments toward girls he was
encountering” in the bathrooms. Some media outlets apparently
reported the story as gospel only to discover later that these
incidents are disputed and the school believes no incident actually
happened. The National Review Online, for example, reported the
claims and then
updated later with the school’s response that they hadn’t had
any incidents of harassment. Others apparently deleted the story
entirely.

Cristan Williams, a writer at Transadvocate,
tracked down the school’s response that the transgendered teen
isn’t harassing anybody and that just one parent is upset. She
found a post from a girl from the same school saying she’s never
seen the student harass anybody else and nobody had a problem with
the student using the girls’ bathroom. Parents apparently got upset
after he was outed as transgendered in a Facebook message
somewhere. Also, the commenter claimed the student gets beaten up
trying to use the boys’ bathroom.

This is going to be the kind of fight where everybody is arguing
over who the true victims are. Opponents are insisting that some
sort of privacy violation is taking place in the school bathrooms,
like these filthy holes are sacred spaces. The Pacific Justice
Institute has a video of a woman in
tears – actual tears – over being unable to stop a biological
boy from using the same bathroom as a girl. If this makes the
ballot, the fight is going to be very unpleasant to watch.
Conservative Republican member of the State Assembly Tim Donnelly
made news for pulling a son out of public school after this law
passed. He just recently announced plans to run for governor and
posted
about his outrage, so he clearly wants it to be an election
issue.

I have yet to see any actual real-world examples that indicate
granting transgendered students some leeway here will result in any
sort of victimization of non-transgendered students. Thinking that
boys will game the system (because that’s really what we’re talking
about, right?) to harass girls ignores that boys honestly don’t
need to go through all this effort if they want to do so. And any
sort of actual harassment could result in discipline and even
criminal charges. Girls can sexually harass other girls and the
same holds true for boys. The increasing acceptance of gay students
didn’t make it legal for gay teens to harass their peers. The
predatory fears of what transgendered folks may be up to may make
for some interesting movie plots, but it’s not a real-world
thing.

Of course, more school choice would help solve all of this, and
all students could find education choices that suit their interests
and needs better. Failing that, this whole effort smells of faux
outrage by adults who are still (and will perpetually be) terrified
of the development of teen sexuality and individual identity.

Venezuelan
President Nicolas Maduro wants to put price controls on all
consumer goods.

From the
BBC:

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro says he plans to extend
price controls to all consumer goods, if he is given powers to
govern by decree.

In a televised address, Mr Maduro said that he wanted to set
legal limits on businesses’ profit margins.

The news comes after electronic stores accused of selling
products at inflated prices were seized in Venezuela. 

From the
Los Angeles Times:

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro ordered the “occupation” of
a chain of electronics stores after the socialist government
accused the company of overcharging its consumers.

Troops went to the Daka chain’s five stores and ordered the
company to start selling its products at lower prices, Reuters
reported. Several managers of the company were arrested.

What could possibly go wrong?

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