Tag: news

Now’s the time for summer
fun…warnings. New Jersey’s Star Ledger
lists “46
Ways to Have a Safer NJ Summer.” That’s right,  almost 50
helpful precautions to digest before the children of the Garden
State are faced with the horror of the great outdoors.

The tips range from the helpful (“If you’re caught in a rip
current…swim parallel to the shore”) to the blindingly obvious
(“Use insect repellent”) to the stunningly, blindingly, in
case you just arrived from Alpha Centauri obvious (“If you see
a bear while out hiking, do not feed or approach it”). Really? Not
even if it’s a cute cub out with its mama?

While it’s not a bad idea to learn how to take a bee stinger out
(although the words “venom sac” do give pause), it is truly a
terrible idea to plan for an afternoon outside as if it’s the
invasion of Normandy.

Some of these tips almost guarantee you and/or your kids will
cower inside all day with Call of Duty: Advanced
Warfare instead of heading out to enjoy the warm
weather.

For instance:

“Avoid forests”

Swear to God, the list says to avoid God’s gift. After all, you
could get ticks.

“Soak in the sun…for five to 10 minutes a day.”

If you go out for any longer than that unslathered in sunscreen,
you might as well call Sloan-Kettering right now.

“Talk to the lifeguards”

That is, distract them from looking out for drowning folks while
you grill them about “water conditions and the existence of
dangerous currents.”

“Don’t dig too deep”

Because once, in 2012, a child smothered in a sand tunnel, you
should worry about every hole your kids dig from now on.

And my favorite:

“Supervise children on playgrounds. Adults
should always [boldface, mine] be nearby
when children are on playgrounds. When kids are playing on the
equipment, they can sometimes stumble or become off balance for a
moment….If parents are nearby, they can catch the child before
they fall and possibly injure themselves.”

So put down that peach, stop talking to the other moms, and
stand, arms outstretched, under the jungle gym. After all, your kid
could “become off balance for a moment.” No children have ever been
known to survive that condition.

Be prepared.

I can’t imagine what kind of people follow
pharmaceutical companies on Twitter, but apparently some do. Seeing
as following folks on Twitter is completely voluntary, I assume
those who do find their tweets informative, interesting, or useful
in some way. But
tweeting about pharmaceuticals will be effectively banned if
new Food and Drug Administration (FDA) guidelines are adopted.
Under
draft guidelines proposed Tuesday, any pro-prescription drug
tweet from a drug company would also have to list risks and side
effects.

Because Twitter is a medium built on non-voluntary brevity, the
new rule would make legally tweeting about prescription drugs
nearly impossible. According to the FDA, risk information includes
“all risk concepts from a boxed warning, all risks that are known
to be fatal or life-threatening, and all contraindications from the
approved product labeling,” in addition to a hyperlink to more
detailed information.

There are potential workarounds—attaching an image with a
drug’s complete warnings label to all tweets, using a tweet
extension app like TwitLonger—but whether these would suffice for
the FDA is anyone’s guess. The draft guidelines would also require
drug companies to include a product’s exact indication (“mild to
moderate memory loss” as opposed to just “memory loss” was the
FDA’s example).

“If a firm concludes that adequate benefit and risk information,
as well as other required information, cannot all be communicated
within the same character-space-limited communication, then the
firm should reconsider using that platform for the intended
promotional message,” the agency says.

The whole matter (like so many the FDA tackles)
seems to involve searching for a problem that doesn’t exist. There
are already ample ways a person can find out about a drug’s risks
and side effects; and because these
are prescription drugs, it’s not as if a person can run
out and buy them based on one Tweet. At some point, a doctor,
pharmacist, and boatload of pharmaceutical literature will confront
patients before they get their hands on it, providing ample
opportunity for discussions about, recitations of, and printed
warnings listing risks and side effects. 

Thomas Sullivan, editor of the Policy and Medicine blog
for medical education company Rockpointe,
said it wasn’t clear whether abbreviations or shortened
words would be allowed. 

“The FDA isn’t necessarily up on the realities of social media,”
Sullivan said, adding that the agency has offered to allow
companies to submit their tweets for approval beforehand.

Sullivan said that Facebook, which has no character limitations,
might still be useful for drug sellers looking for some traction on
social media. So far the agency has refrained from suggesting
regulations for image sharing sites like Pinterest and Instagram,
Sullivan said.

I’m sure it’s only a matter of time, the way things are
going.

But should we automatically dismiss the idea of regulating how
drug companies can advertise on social media? Twitter and Facebook
are, after all, advertising platforms in this context; and the FDA
governs how drug companies advertise in more traditional mediums.
Rightly or wrongly, the FDA currently has the authority to require
risk disclosures in printed or broadcast drug advertisements. But
it can’t compel a person, even a company spokesperson, to follow
all statements about X with Y and Z. So is a drug tweet more like a
television ad or an uttered statement? Does it matter? 

Advertisement or not, commercial speech is still afforded
protections by the First Amendment—even
commercial speech from drug companies. And I’m a fan of erring
on the side of free speech. If a drug company makes false
statements on Twitter, there are already existing legal correctives
for that. But that’s not what we’re facing. The FDA’s Twitter
guidelines seem to surpass what consumer protection warrants and
cross over into unconstitutional speech infringement.

The
gross U.S. government debt now stands at $17 trillion, more than
double what it was a decade ago. It’s still expanding, as the
Treasury Department pays out more than it takes in, and the
shortfall is expected to grow over the next decade. So it’s deeply
gratifying to learn that Americans are “highly concerned” about the
problem.

Americans do want Washington to bring the budget under control.
The catch is that they have no idea what it would take—and reject
the steps that would be needed, writes Steve Chapman. They want it
in the same way they want to be thin, rich and well informed: only
if the goal can be achieved with no effort.

Americans, in short, are willing to do anything to cut the
deficit and restrain the debt except what needs to be done. They
overwhelmingly prefer bogus remedies to real ones and magical
thinking to reality, according to Chapman.

View this article.

The
gross U.S. government debt now stands at $17 trillion, more than
double what it was a decade ago. It’s still expanding, as the
Treasury Department pays out more than it takes in, and the
shortfall is expected to grow over the next decade. So it’s deeply
gratifying to learn that Americans are “highly concerned” about the
problem.

Americans do want Washington to bring the budget under control.
The catch is that they have no idea what it would take—and reject
the steps that would be needed, writes Steve Chapman. They want it
in the same way they want to be thin, rich and well informed: only
if the goal can be achieved with no effort.

Americans, in short, are willing to do anything to cut the
deficit and restrain the debt except what needs to be done. They
overwhelmingly prefer bogus remedies to real ones and magical
thinking to reality, according to Chapman.

View this article.

President Obama is scheduled to
make a statement “on the situation in
Iraq” at the White House at 12:30p.m. Last week, the president
indicated he was considering intervening militarily in Iraq. U.S.
forces, of course, left the country in 2011
despite efforts by Obama to extend their stay there.

The White House insisted yesterday the president hadn’t made a
decision yet, and The Hill
reports:

After a meeting with top congressional
leaders Wednesday afternoon in the Oval Office, lawmakers
said they did not think the president would come to them to ask for
authorization for a military strike.

“The president briefed us on the situation in Iraq and indicated
he didn’t feel he had any need for authority from us for steps that
he might take and indicated that he would keep us posted,” Senate
Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) introduced a resolution to repeal the
Congressional authorization of the use of military force (AUMF) in
Iraq at the beginning of the year, but the Democrat-controlled
Senate has not acted on it. President Obama, who has generally not
sought any kind of congressional authorization for his various
military interventions, is naturally unlikely to do so here,
especially given the Congress’ inability, or unwillingness, to
repeal the Iraq AUMF.

The president initially said he
wouldn’t be sending troops to Iraq, although a few days later
he
did send troops to Iraq. He’s also
considering air strikes against insurgents in Iraq, something
Iraq’s beleaguered prime minister secretly asked for last month,
before the Islamic State of Iraq (ISIS) made significant gains
across the country.

You know what’s gross? Reusable grocery bags. Think about it:
You put a leaky package of chicken in your cloth or plastic tote.
Then you empty the bag, crumple it up, and toss in the trunk of
your car to fester. A week later, you go shopping again and throw
some veggies you’re planning to eat raw into the same bag. Ew.

And that’s just the yuck factor. There’s also an ongoing debate
about the environmental and economic impact of these increasingly
popular bans and taxes. Luckily, Reason Foundation, the nonprofit
that publishes Reason magazine, issued a
new report today that looks at the issue from just about
every angle. 

The report addresses my pet peeve, the health impact of reusable
bags, quoting one survey in Arizona and California which found
coliform
bacteria in half of the bags tested. But that’s just a
small part of the report

A few more fun facts:

One common justification for bans is that using
less plastic means using less oil. But the lightweight plastic
bags we are accustomed to using—high-density polyethylene bags—are
actually made almost entirely from natural gas, not oil. Meanwhile,
a popular kind of reusable totes—non-woven polypropylene (NWPP)
bags—are derived from oil. 

Municipalities seem to be in a contest to claim ever-increasing
percentages of their litter are attributable to plastic bags. As
the report notes:

A 2006 report by the California Coastal Commission claimed that
plastic bags comprise 3.8% of beach litter. More recently, a Dallas
City Council memo claimed that 5% of all litter comes from plastic
bags. Most dramatically, a study from the California Ocean
Protection Council claimed that plastic bags of all types make up
about 8% of all coastal litter. 

But the definitive American litter study—yep, such a thing
exists—finds figures that are closer to 1 percent or even
lower:

The Reason report also takes on storm drains, the infamous
“garbage patch” in the Pacific Ocean, cost to consumers, and much
more.

A complementary report released today by Reason
Foundation looks
at the impact of a proposed ban in California as well.

And here’s a blast from the past: Yours truly in a live
broadcast at The Huffington Post debating
two adorable school children and some sea turtles about
plastic bag bans.

In was inevitable. Now it’s
happening. Desert Wolf, a company in South Africa, has created a
drone capable of shooting pepper spray and “blinding lasers” at
unruly crowds. The company has sold 25 of the drones to a mining
company after showing them off at a trade show, the BBC reports.
They offer more details of
the drones’ weaponry:

Desert Wolf’s website states that its Skunk octacopter drone is
fitted with four high-capacity paintball barrels, each capable of
firing up to 20 bullets per second.

In addition to pepper-spray ammunition, the firm says it can
also be armed with dye-marker balls and solid plastic balls.

The machine can carry up to 4,000 bullets at a time as well as
“blinding lasers” and on-board speakers that can communicate
warnings to a crowd.

CNet
notes that these “blinding lasers” are forbidden for use in war
by the Geneva Convention and adds that weapons that are classified
as “non-lethal” often do kill anyway:

“These weapons cannot be sufficiently well controlled to avoid
causing serious injury, especially to eyes,” warns Mark Gubrud of
campaign group the International Committee for Robot Arms Control.
“Many existing “non-lethal” crowd-control weapons can and often do
kill.”

Right now it appears that mining companies in countries that
have seen violent
clashes between striking workers and authorities are most
interested. But is it only a matter of time before the infamous
“pepper spray cop” is replaced by a “pepper spray drone”? Well, at
least the drone won’t apply for
workers’ compensation payments afterward.

Advances in providing for the education and enlightenment of the
general public, from the city of Leawood, Kansas,
as reported by KMBC TV:

Leawood city leaders have told Spencer Collins that he has to
stop sharing books with his neighbors.

Collins had to take down his little free library, essentially a
communal bookshelf, on Wednesday. The motto of the sharing center
had been “take a book, leave a book,” but Collins learned there’s a
lot less give and take in city government….

“When we got home from vacation, there was a letter from the
city of Leawood saying that it was in code violation and it needed
to be down by the 19th or we would receive a citation,” said
Spencer’s mother, Sarah Collins. 

Leawood said the little house is an accessory structure. The
city bans buildings that aren’t attached to someone’s home.

The hand of government is wise, and sympathetic, but it
must be firm:

“We empathize with them, but we still have to follow the rules,”
said Richard Coleman of the City of Leawood. “We need to treat
everybody the same. So we can’t say if somebody files a complaint
but we like the little libraries — we think they’re cute — so we
ignore it. We can’t do that.”

Because Leawood is a community that cares about
culture, but also about safety: “Leawood said it has received
two complaints about Spencer Collins’ library.”

Meanwhile, the utopian anarchists in neighboring community
Prairie Valley “told KMBC 9’s Haley Harrison that the city
simply doesn’t enforce codes that would restrict little free
libraries.”

It
looks like a cop in Baltimore won’t be getting away with killing a
dog in the line of duty. WRIC, the ABC affiliate in Richmond,
Virginia,
reports:

Officer Jeffrey Bolger is charged with felony animal cruelty and
has been suspended without pay.

Police say Bolger, along with other officers, responded to a
woman who said she’d been bitten by a dog. Police say the dog, a
7-year-old Shar Pei, had already been secured with a dog pole when
Bolger allegedly pulled out a knife and slit the dog’s throat.

Police say the dog didn’t appear to be posing any threat to the
cops. Bolger is actually the second Baltimore cop to be charged
with animal cruelty this year. In February, Officer

Alec Taylor beat and choked to death his girlfriend’s
seven-month-old dog and then sent her a picture, telling
investigators he was tired of cleaning up after the dog. Taylor,
too, was suspended without pay but not immediately fired.

Private sector employees in roles that require interaction with
the public would almost certainly be fired after being charged with
animal cruelty—it would be difficult otherwise for a private
company to survive the damage such incidents would cause to its
reputation. The Baltimore Police Department (BPD) and its officers
have no such worries. The officers’ jobs are protected by union
contracts, and the BPD has a guaranteed revenue stream from
taxpayers. Government is just the things we do together and the
sociopaths we hire to do them.

It
looks like a cop in Baltimore won’t be getting away with killing a
dog in the line of duty. WRIC, the ABC affiliate in Richmond,
Virginia,
reports:

Officer Jeffrey Bolger is charged with felony animal cruelty and
has been suspended without pay.

Police say Bolger, along with other officers, responded to a
woman who said she’d been bitten by a dog. Police say the dog, a
7-year-old Shar Pei, had already been secured with a dog pole when
Bolger allegedly pulled out a knife and slit the dog’s throat.

Police say the dog didn’t appear to be posing any threat to the
cops. Bolger is actually the second Baltimore cop to be charged
with animal cruelty this year. In February, Officer

Alec Taylor beat and choked to death his girlfriend’s
seven-month-old dog and then sent her a picture, telling
investigators he was tired of cleaning up after the dog. Taylor,
too, was suspended without pay but not immediately fired.

Private sector employees in roles that require interaction with
the public would almost certainly be fired after being charged with
animal cruelty—it would be difficult otherwise for a private
company to survive the damage such incidents would cause to its
reputation. The Baltimore Police Department (BPD) and its officers
have no such worries. The officers’ jobs are protected by union
contracts, and the BPD has a guaranteed revenue stream from
taxpayers. Government is just the things we do together and the
sociopaths we hire to do them.