Categories
ideological culture

Autopsy Myopia

The results are in: Actor Philip Seymour Hoffman died from acute mixed drug intoxication. He had combined heroin with benzodiazepines. That combination did him in.

It wasn’t a “heroin overdose” as such.

Indeed, according to Jacob Sullum writing at reason.com,

Drug combinations like this are typical of deaths attributed to heroin or other narcotics. Data from the Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN) indicate that “multi-drug deaths” accounted for most fatalities involving opiates or opioids in 2010: 72 percent in suburban New York, 83 percent in Los Angeles, and 56 percent in Chicago, for example. Back in the early 1990s, the share of heroin-related deaths reported by DAWN that involved other drugs was even higher, 90 percent or more.

We hear about “overdoses” of illegal drugs for the simple reason that this plays into the hands of those who run the War on Drugs. It’s an inconvenient truth, for them, that the most deadly problem with most narcotics (illegal or prescription-legal) is with what other drugs (illegal or prescription-legal or over-the-counter) they interact.

One might argue that drug warriors, by focusing on targeted illegal drugs, are killing Americans by distracting us from the biggest danger, mixing drugs.

This over-focus on a hated thing to the detriment of good diagnosis is not limited to pharmacology.

Consider economic policy. I know many people who blame the 2008 financial implosion (as well as its lingering effects, even) entirely on the 1990s (bipartisan) repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. They focus on one bit of deregulation. Other enforced regulations leading to the debacle, not to mention Federal Reserve inflationism, housing market subsidies, anti-discrimination programs, and a whole mortgage after-market created by government creatures, Fannie and Freddie?

Blankout.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

Categories
Thought

Frédéric Bastiat

Among the new arrangements that feeble mortals are invited to make trial of, there is one that is presented to us in terms worthy of attention. Its formula is: Association, voluntary and progressive.

Categories
ideological culture too much government

Are You My Father?

Van Jones, the president’s controversial former green jobs czar, must have been struck by lightning yesterday en route to taping ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”

Discussing President Obama’s new “My Brother’s Keeper” program to “build pathways to success” for at-risk “children of color,” Van Jones embraced a notion of corporate personhood far beyond anything previously expressed . . . well, by anyone.

First, Jones advanced the new Obama initiative as just another bailout: “Listen, everybody else . . . got in trouble in America. Wall Street got in trouble; we were there for them. The auto industry got in trouble; we were there for the auto industry. You got a whole generation of young kids who are clearly in trouble.”

A bailout isn’t a dad, though.

And functioning fathers are “essential,” argued Manhattan Institute scholar Heather MacDonald. Noting that fatherless kids are 20 times more likely to go to prison and nine times more likely to drop out of school, she applauded the president’s statement that “nothing keeps a young man out of trouble like a father who takes an active role in his son’s life.”

MacDonald also highlighted that a whopping 73 percent of black children are now born to single mothers, and that three decades of social programs “haven’t made much difference.”

“Do you think you need anybody to tell us how terrible this is?” Van Jones, who is black, pointedly asked Mac Donald. “We work on it every day. We need corporate America to step up.”

Jones wants corporations to be fathers to our children? That’s taking personhood for corporations too far.

And asking too little of men.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Frédéric Bastiat

Rousseau’s SOCIAL CONTRACT … appears to me well fitted to exhibit the characteristics of these artificial social organizations. The inventors of such systems set out with the idea that society is a state contrary to nature, and they seek to subject humanity to different combinations. They forget that its motive power, its spring of action, is in itself. They regard men as base materials, and aspire to impart to them movement and will, sentiment and life; placing themselves at an immeasurable height above the whole human race. These are features common to all the inventors of social organizations. The inventions are different—the inventors are alike.

Categories
links

Townhall: Sacramento’s Subsidy Kings

The Sacramento stadium subsidy scandal, touched upon on Thursday, should be a bigger story in the news and with the commentariat. So click on over to Townhall, and share. Then come back here for some more reading:

This weekend’s Townhall column is, of course, an expansion of Thursday’s Common Sense. There was one small error in that outing, so the column sets the record straight.

Finally, on the matter of the immorality of subsidy, where to begin? Probably with “The Law” by Frédéric Bastiat. There are many inexpensive editions about, and, on the Net, many free sources as well. For the past few weeks This is Common Sense has included a lot of “Thoughts,” to the right of each daily post, that are from Bastiat. Those will likely continue for at least another week. He was a great writer.

The term Bastiat used for what is happening in Sacramento, and which forms the basis for many a politician’s “ideology,” is LEGAL PLUNDER.

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video

Video: Ladar Levison on Snowden, Lavabit, the NSA, and Government Gag Orders

A fascinating ReasonTV interview:

Categories
ideological culture responsibility

A Trumped-up “Consensus”

“A co-founder of Greenpeace told a Senate panel on Tuesday that there is no scientific evidence to back claims that humans are the ‘dominant cause’ of climate change,” the Washington Times reported yesterday.

But what about that grand consensus — “97 percent” — of scientists saying the exact opposite?

Well, economist and legal theoretician David D. Friedman wrote, this week, that one of the most famous citations about the climate change consensus is the result of some, uh, data fudging.

Friedman chased down the origin of that infamous and oft-repeated 97 percent figure through three papers, all available online. Despite the high tone of certainty, the scientists who collated information from surveys of other scientists did not find that “over 97% endorsed the view that the Earth is warming up and human emissions of greenhouse gases are the main cause.” At best, a huge cohort of these scientists agreed that humans merely contributed to global warming. Very different.

Friedman concluded that the main author responsible for the strong interpretation of weak findings,  John Cook, told “a deliberate lie.”

This scientist’s misrepresentation of “the result of his own research” doesn’t prove that Anthropogenic Global Warming is true or untrue, of course. But it does suggest that the “consensus” so much talked about is shaky indeed.

I began the week talking about our reliance upon experts to gather, analyze and report on information honestly and reliably.

And how horrible it is when they let us down.

The climate change we need is in the culture of academic responsibility.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Today

Rein Taagepera Feb 28

Estonian physicist, politician, and analyst of democracy, Rein Taagepera, was born on February 28, 1933. He is the author of “Predicting Party Sizes: The Logic of Simple Electoral Systems.”

Categories
Thought

Frédéric Bastiat

Force . . . is what the organizers need who would subject humanity to their experiments. When they shall have gained over to their cause the Russian autocrat, the shah of Persia, the khan of Tartary, and all the other tyrants of the world, they will find that they still lack the power to distribute mankind into groups and classes, and to annihilate the general laws of property, exchange, inheritance, and family; for even in Russia, in Persia, and in Tartary, it is necessary to a certain extent to consult the feelings, habits, and prejudices of the people.

Categories
ballot access free trade & free markets insider corruption too much government

King Kevin and Company

Oh, how the other half lives!

And lies.

By “other half,” I don’t mean “the wealthy.” They’re as honest as any other group. No, I’m talking about those with their hands on the levers of government power . . . along with their subsidy-seeking cronies.

Mayor Kevin Johnson, an all-star in the National Basketball Association before becoming a politician, is splurging nearly $300 million tax dollars — roughly the city’s entire yearly budget — to build the owners of the NBA’s Sacramento Kings a brand new arena.

People objected, with 23,000 citizens signing petitions to put this lavish subsidy to a vote. Yesterday, a judge ruled that the measure would be kept off the ballot: errors in the wording of the petition “disqualified” it.

In a prepared sore-winner statement, Mayor Johnson called the petitioners “outsiders” who “have tried to undermine the right of Sacramento to control the destiny of our Kings, our downtown and our future.”

Johnson doesn’t mean the right “of the people” to control. He means his right to dictate for Sacramento even against the will of the majority.

The leader of one group working against a public vote on the arena giveaway attacked local businessman Chris Rufer, charging that “Rufer’s funding . . . is supporting STOP’s effort to steal 4,000 jobs, steal a once-in-a-generation opportunity to transform downtown and makes him an accomplice in Seattle’s attempt to steal the Kings.”

Who’s stealing? Those spending their own money so people can vote? Or those blocking a vote so they can spend other people’s money?

“I’m against subsidy, period. It’s simply a moral argument,” Rufer explains. “If it was a subsidy for a fish pond, I’d be against it.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.