Jts5665

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) has a bachelor's degree in business administration. Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) has an MBA from Harvard. Yet the two senators seem to think they have the medical expertise to second-guess the judgment of physicians across the United States, not to mention the Food and Drug Administration. A bill they introduced last week, the FDA Opioid Labeling Accuracy Act, instructs the agency to tell prescribers that opioids are "not intended for the treatment of chronic pain."

Their reasoning is hard to follow. "In the United States," Manchin says, "we consume 80 percent of the world's opioid production and in 2017, one single year, over 70,000 people died due to drug overdoses."

The first figure largely reflects the fact that opioids remain appallingly unavailable in much of the world, even for purposes that Manchin and Braun would approve, such as "end-of-life care" and "treatment of pain related to cancer," both of which the bill mentions as exceptions. The second figure is highly misleading, since the category of opioids that includes the most commonly prescribed analgesics played a role in just one-fifth of those 70,000 drug-related deaths in 2017, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Furthermore, more than 90 percent of the cases that involved prescription analgesics such as hydrocodone and oxycodone also involved other drugs, most commonly illicit opioids such as heroin and fentanyl. Even if we focus on the relatively small share of drug-related deaths that involve opioid analgesics, blaming chronic pain treatment seems misplaced, since patients who depend upon these drugs to make their lives livable are not inclined to part with them, meaning that short-term prescriptions for acute pain are more likely sources of diverted pain pills.

Even while arguing that opioids are not appropriate for treatment of chronic pain in patients who do not have cancer and are not on the verge of death, Manchin and Braun concede that sometimes they are. Their bill makes an exception for cases where "a prescriber determin[es] that, with respect to a particular patient, other non-opioid pain management treatments are inadequate or inappropriate." Since that is the judgment doctors are already supposed to be making, the only point of this bill seems to be further discouraging such prescriptions by making physicians worry, even more than they already do, that their good-faith assessments of patients' needs will expose them to scrutiny that could deprive them of their licenses, livelihoods, and maybe even their liberty.

The government's crackdown on pain pills already has led to medically reckless dose reductions and patient abandonment across the country. The problem became so severe that the CDC recently warned that its 2016 opioid prescribing guidelines should not be interpreted as endorsing, let alone requiring, involuntary tapering or discontinuation, which may lead to "adverse psychological and physical outcomes" (including suicide), "could represent patient abandonment," and "can result in missed opportunities to provide potentially lifesaving information and treatment." A bill like Manchin and Braun's can only aggravate this problem, while making doctors less inclined to treat chronic pain to begin with.

"Most pain specialists agree that, in some cases, long-term opioid therapy is all that works for some chronic pain patients," notes Phoenix surgeon Jeffrey Singer, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. "What the senators fail to recognize is that patients are not one-size-fits-all. Different patients respond to pain and to pain management differently. Their proposed legislation, if passed, will only serve to exacerbate the unnecessary suffering of patients in pain that the CDC is trying to undo with its guideline clarification."

YOUR SCIENTISTS WERE SO PREOCCUPIED WITH WHETHER OR NOT THEY COULD, THEY DIDN’T STOP TO THINK IF THEY SHOULD: Arby’s has flipped the vegan ‘meat’ trend on its head with the ‘megetable,’ a carrot made out of turkey that looks and tastes almost exactly like the vegetable.

THE SCIENCE OF HEALTHY EATING:

Topol said he was so interested in how the gut microbiome—the ecosystem of microorganisms that live in the human digestive system—impacts health that he signed up for a study with the Weizmann Institute of Science to spend a week measuring his own body’s response to food. What he found shocked him: Oatmeal was spiking his glucose to potentially dangerous levels, but bratwurst was rated as an A-plus food for him.

But note that after this, he’s still a science-denier. “‘Is it gonna change my whole nutritional plan? No,’ said Topol, who, as a cardiologist, indicated a reticence to eat a bunch of sausage.”

I THOUGHT THE SCIENCE WAS SETTLED: Shocking evidence shows people in vegetative states may be conscious: 1 in 10 people thought to be permanently unconscious as a result of brain trauma may actually be aware.

GOVERNMENT: Humboldt County threatened cannabis fines. They were growing peaches and tomatoes.

The Neukoms themselves had to think fast. Their daily farming grind went on the back burner as they spent time providing proof to the county that the property in question carries no cannabis plants.

At night, the couple worried aloud to each other, not about the peaches and tomatoes they grow, but whether the county would accept their proof over the false accusation.

“I told the county, ‘I think we’ve been caught up in a dragnet when we weren’t supposed to be,’” Jacques Neukom said. “Just because you have a driver’s license doesn’t mean you get a speeding ticket. And just because I have a greenhouse in my backyard doesn’t mean I’m growing cannabis in it.”

He added that the county staff were “very professional” in handling the process. But the implications of being flagged for illegal cannabis stretch past the burden of proving innocence.

What a mess.

I know that for many folks today, history seems increasingly irrelevant.  Millenials will say that anything a bunch of old white guys were doing 500 years ago has no bearing on their lives.  Or perhaps more accurately, they don't want it to have any bearing on their life.

I love history in and of itself, but studying it has real value in understanding public policy choices. The problem in public policy is that we can seldom run good controlled studies (e.g. half of you will live under socialism and half capitalism and we will see who does better).  And even when we do inadvertently run A/B tests (e.g. blue state fiscal and regulatory model vs red state) we seldom pay attention to the results in part because we are just too close to them and too invested in them in one way or another.

But if you look back through enough time and across enough different civilizations, humans have already run millions of experiments and we can read the results.  I find it impossible, for example, to look at our government today without thinking of Rome and the Gracchi brothers in the 2nd century BC.  People today are trying to throw out institutional checks and balances, rules of decorum, traditions of collegiality, and limitations on power because they feel these are standing in the way of (mostly) well-meaning improvement programs ( in areas such as climate, income inequality, racism, etc).  But history teaches that such efforts always end the same way.  As in Rome in 133BC or Russian in 1917 or Cuba in 1957 or in many other historical cases, the inroads made by well-meaning idealists in weakening limits on individual power just open the door for real iron-fisted authoritarians to take the helm.

FLORIDA CITY GIVES IN TO $600,000 BITCOIN RANSOMWARE DEMAND. But there’s no guarantee hackers will actually restore Riviera Beach’s systems.

Silly hackers — don’t they know that the really big bucks are to be made in environmental impact studies of removing high school George Washington murals?

SATIRE… OR IS IT? Ocasio-Cortez Gets Head Stuck In Bucket, Journalists Rush To Explain Why It Was Actually A Genius Move. “Most people don’t have her scientific curiosity and intelligence,” said MSNBC pundit Chris Hayes. “Someone incurious like Trump would never look at a bucket and ask ‘Could my head fit inside that?’ But Ocasio-Cortez dives into such questions head first.”

You probably saw the headlines, like this one from CNN: white meat raises your bad cholesterol just as much as red meat!  It’s complete nonsense.  Here’s why.  Transcript is below.

Hello, I’m Tom Naughton and this is the Fat Head Report.

Believe it or not, it’s already time for another edition of Meat Will Kill You.

For more than 40 years, the experts have been telling us that to avoid heart disease, we should eat less beef and more chicken. And we did.

Well, now that they’ve decided we should all be vegetarians — to save the planet you know — it was only a matter of time before they started going after chicken.

Take a look at this headline. White meat is just as bad for you as red beef when it comes to your cholesterol level, study says.

The article is about a study where researchers put people on a diet that was either high or low in saturated fat, then had them take turns eating a diet where the proteins came from plants, or chicken, or beef.

And here’s what they found.

Plant proteins had the healthiest impact on blood cholesterol, while the effects of white and red meats on participants’ cholesterol levels were identical when saturated fat levels were equivalent.

Now wait a second. Beef is much higher in saturated fat than chicken. So how do you get people eating chicken to consume as much saturated fat as people eating beef?

Well, it turns out the researchers kept the saturated fat and the same by adding butter. It’s right there in the study. The diet based on chicken included more butter.

Which means this study doesn’t tell us anything about chicken. It simply tells us that saturated fat raises LDL. Doesn’t matter if the saturated fat comes from beef or butter.

Ahh, yes, it’s scary stuff. So the real message is to avoid beef and butter, right? Wrong.

You don’t develop heart disease because your body makes too much LDL. You develop heart disease because your body makes the wrong kind of LDL.

When your coronary arteries become damaged or inflamed, LDL shows up to repair the damage. But if your body is producing LDL that’s small and dense, then those particles can become embedded in your arteries and trigger the formation of a plaque.

Here are a couple of quotes from studies on LDL particle size and heart disease:

LDL particles showed the strongest association with cardiovascular events when the particle composition, rather than the total concentration, was investigated.

The LDL subclass pattern characterized by a preponderance of small, dense LDL particles was significantly associated with a threefold increased risk of myocardial infarction.

Large, fluffy LDL isn’t the kind that becomes embedded in your arteries. In fact, large LDL not only won’t kill you, it appears to be protective.

People who produce a lot of large LDL are less likely to develop cancer. They’re less likely to become depressed. They’re less likely to come down with nasty infections.

And that’s why a number of studies have shown that older people with high LDL Live longer than older people with low LDL.

So with that in mind, let’s go back to that study telling us that white meat is just as bad as red meat.

Yes, when people ate beef, or chicken with butter, their LDL went up. But that’s because they produced more large LDL. They did not produce more small LDL. It’s right there in the study.

So for me, the real take away message from the latest Meat Will Kill You study is this. If you like beef, go ahead and eat it. And if you’d rather have chicken, add some butter.

NEWS YOU CAN USE (CLIMATE ALARMISM EDITION): “Statements like the following are increasingly common in popular media, academic journals, and political discourse: “The evidence that anthropogenic climate change is an existential threat to our way of life is incontrovertible.” Not so—not even close.” Marlo Lewis explain why here.

WOW: ‘Pumping heart patch’ ready for human use.

Sewn on to the heart, the 3cm (1in) by 2cm patch, grown in a lab from a sample of the patient’s own cells, then turns itself into healthy working muscle.

It also releases chemicals that repair and regenerate existing heart cells.

Tests in rabbits show it appears safe, Imperial College London experts told a leading heart conference in Manchester.

Patient trials should start in the next two years, the British Cardiovascular Society meeting heard.

Researcher Dr Richard Jabbour said: “One day, we hope to add heart patches to the treatments that doctors can routinely offer people after a heart attack.

“We could prescribe one of these patches alongside medicines for someone with heart failure, which you could take from a shelf and implant straight in to a person.”

Two years is a long time to wait for anyone who’s suffered a heart attack, so… faster, please.

COLLUDING WITH THE ENEMY: Twitter Takes Down Accounts of China Dissidents Ahead of Tiananmen Anniversary.

I’M SURE IT’S PURELY A COINCIDENCE: Twitter takes down ‘a large number’ of Chinese-language accounts ahead of Tiananmen Square anniversary.

In a recent dissenting opinion, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch warns of the dangers of the modern expansion of criminal law to the point where "almost anyone can be arrested for anything":

History shows that governments sometimes seek to regulate our lives finely, acutely, thoroughly, and exhaustively. In our own time and place, criminal laws have grown so exuberantly and come to cover so much previously innocent conduct that almost anyone can be arrested for something. If the state could use these laws not for their intended purposes but to silence those who voice unpopular ideas, little would be left of our First Amendment liberties, and little would separate us from the tyrannies of the past or the malignant fiefdoms of our own age. The freedom to speak with-out risking arrest is "one of the principal characteristics by which we distinguish a free nation." Houston v. Hill, 482 U. S. 451, 463 (1987).

The immediate point of Gorsuch's argument is to criticize the idea that having "probable cause" for an arrest should automatically invalidate a claim that the arrest violated the First Amendment because it was being used as a tool to punish dissenting speech. He is absolutely right on that point.  For reasons I discussed here, the vast modern expansion of both criminal and civil liability poses a more general threat to the rule of law:

Lavrenti Beria, the infamous head of the Soviet secret police under Joseph Stalin, supposedly once said, "Show me the man and I'll show you the crime." In the Soviet Union, the regime could always find some crime to pin on anyone it chose to target.

As a general rule, it would be silly to equate the modern United States with a mass-murdering totalitarian state. But in this one respect, the two regimes are more similar than we would like them to be….

This sad state of affairs is deeply at odds with the rule of law. Whatever else that concept means, it surely requires that ordinary people be able to readily determine what laws they are required to obey, and that whether or not you get charged by authorities depends more on objective legal rules than the exercise of official discretion. Unfortunately, neither holds true in the United States today….

Scholars estimate that the vast majority of adult Americans have violated criminal law at some point in their lives. Indeed, a recent survey finds that some 52 percent admit to violating the federal law banning possession of marijuana, to say nothing of the myriad other federal criminal laws. If you also include civil laws (which, though theoretically less severe than criminal laws, often carry heavy fines and other substantial penalties), even more Americans are lawbreakers…

Most Americans, of course, never face punishment for their lawbreaking. But that is true only because the authorities lack the resources to pursue most violators and routinely exercise discretion in determining which ones are worth the effort….

In this way, the rule of law has largely been supplanted by the rule of chance and the rule of executive discretion. Inevitably, political ideology and partisanship have a major impact on the latter. For example, federal law enforcement priorities are very different under Trump than they were under Obama.

Even the law itself is often interpreted differently, depending on who is in power…. As Supreme Court Justice Neil M. Gorsuch puts it, an agency can "reverse its current view 180 degrees anytime based merely on the shift of political winds and still prevail [in court]." The enormous scope of federal regulatory law enables agencies to exercise extensive discretionary authority over many aspects of the economy and society.

In my earlier post on this subject, I consider a number of strategies for alleviating this problem, such as trying to enforce all laws to the hilt (thereby eliminating executive discretion), and curtailing judicial deference to administrative agencies (thereby reducing the extent to which the same laws are interpreted differently based on which party is in power). I am skeptical that either will do the trick (and the former is likely impossible). Ultimately, the best solution is to cut back on the scope and complexity of law, though I  fear we may not have the political will to do it:

The only way to make major progress toward establishing the rule of law would be to greatly reduce the scope and complexity of legal rules. In a world where the scope of law is strictly limited, officials might have sufficient resources to go after a much larger percentage of lawbreakers. And if the law were limited to those areas where there was a broad consensus that the conduct in question should be illegal, there would be less incentive for officials to engage in selective enforcement based on the priorities of the party in power. If federal or state authorities engaged in such shenanigans with respect to laws that enjoyed widespread bipartisan support, they would risk provoking a major political backlash.

There is no way to completely eliminate executive discretion over law enforcement or to make the law completely transparent to laypeople. But cutting back on the amount and complexity of law can help us make progress toward those goals.

Of course, it may be we do not value the rule of law enough to sacrifice any other objectives to strengthen it.  The laws on the books are not there by accident. Most were enacted because they were supported by majority public  opinion, influential interest groups or some combination of both.

Perhaps we just do not care about the rule of law enough to eliminate any substantial number of current laws and regulations — especially those supported by our side of the political spectrum. The rule of law may be less important to us than the rule of  men whose agenda we like. If so, we might have more in common with Lavrenti Beria than we like to think.

UPDATE: I accidentally failed to include a link to my earlier post on this subject in the first place where it is mentioned above. I apologize for any confusion, and have now corrected that error.

THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED: 102-Year-Old Woman Says Drinking Beer Is the Secret to Long Life.

IBD: The Stunning Statistical Fraud Behind The Global Warming Scare.

The actual measured temperature record shows something different: There have been hot years and hot decades since the turn of the last century, and colder years and colder decades. But the overall measured temperature shows no clear trend over the last century, at least not one that suggests runaway warming.

That is, until the NOAA’s statisticians “adjust” the data. Using complex statistical models, they change the data to reflect not reality, but their underlying theories of global warming. That’s clear from a simple fact of statistics: Data generate random errors, which cancel out over time. So by averaging data, the errors mostly disappear.

That’s not what NOAA does.

According to the NOAA, the errors aren’t random. They’re systematic. As we noted, all of their temperature adjustments lean cooler in the distant past, and warmer in the more recent past. But they’re very fuzzy about why this should be.

Far from legitimately “adjusting” anything, it appears they are cooking the data to show a politically correct trend toward global warming. Not by coincidence, that has been part and parcel of the government’s underlying policies for the better part of two decades.

What NOAA does aren’t niggling little changes, either.

Government cooking the books like this would be a major scandal if we had a nonpartisan press.

WAR ON SCIENCE:

Here’s the report on collusion between Antifa and the blue-check crowd, which the Antifa mass-report response certainly does nothing to undermine. . . .

OUR PATHETIC RULING CLASS:

THIS IS COOL VIDEO: Extreme Close Up of Tornado Near Wray, Colorado. “Storm chasers almost never get swept up by tornadoes because the sheer weight of their balls keeps them anchored to the ground, what a crazy and dangerous job.”

INCENTIVES WORK: Brewery offers free beer for info on stolen van, 42 minutes later, it was located.

WHEN TURKEY DESTROYED ITS CHRISTIANS:

Between 1894 and 1924, the number of Christians in Asia Minor fell from some 3-4 million to just tens of thousands—from 20% of the area’s population to under 2%. Turkey has long attributed this decline to wars and the general chaos of the period, which claimed many Muslim lives as well. But the descendants of Turkey’s Christians, many of them dispersed around the world since the 1920s, maintain that the Turks murdered about half of their forebears and expelled the rest.

The Christians are correct. Our research verifies their claims: Turkey’s Armenian, Greek and Assyrian (or Syriac) communities disappeared as a result of a staggered campaign of genocide beginning in 1894, perpetrated against them by their Muslim neighbors. By 1924, the Christian communities of Turkey and its adjacent territories had been destroyed.

Over the past decade, we have sifted through the Turkish, U.S., British and French archives, as well as some Greek materials and the papers of the German and Austro-Hungarian foreign ministries. This research has made it possible to document a strikingly consistent pattern of ethno-religious atrocity over three decades, perpetrated by the Turkish government, army, police and populace.

The concentrated slaughter of Turkey’s Armenians in 1915-16, commonly known as the Armenian genocide, is well documented and acknowledged (outside of Turkey, which still bitterly objects to the charge). But the Armenian genocide was only a part, albeit the centerpiece, of a larger span of elimination that lasted some 30 years. Our work provides the first detailed description and analysis of the 1894-96 massacres and the destruction of the region’s Greek and remaining Armenian communities in 1919-24 by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish republic.

The bloodshed was importantly fueled throughout by religious animus. Muslim Turks—aided by fellow Muslims, including Kurds, Circassians, Chechens and Arabs—murdered about two million Christians in bouts of slaughter immediately before, during and after World War I. These massacres were organized by three successive governments, those of the Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II, the Young Turks and, finally, Atatürk. These governments also expelled between 1.5 and 2 million Christians, mostly to Greece.

The book is The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894–1924.

UGH: Senate Republicans Use New Rules to Save a Crony Institution.

After nuking their debate rules for nominations last month for the stated reason that they wanted to push the confirmations of more Republican judges, the Senate this week used the rule change instead to waste precious floor time expanding corporate cronyism.

The Export-Import (Ex-Im) Bank for more than 1,000 days has lacked the full quorum of its board of directors, which is necessary to approve taxpayer-funded loans of over $10 million to benefit America’s richest corporations (think Boeing, Caterpillar, and General Electric). The board now has a full slate, and can confirm loans up to $100 million.

The Ex-Im bank, you may recall, loomed large on the Tea Party agenda in 2014 and 2015. It stood as a symbol of everything establishment Washington had gotten wrong: K Street colluding, corporate favoritism, and the general feeling of, “Wait, I’m sorry, my tax dollars do what?”

Washington is where bad ideas go to achieve immortality.

In an authoritarian regime, those in power demand obedience but not necessarily agreement from their subjects.  Even if many of their subjects might oppose the regime, the rulers are largely content as long as everyone obeys, no matter how grudgingly.

Totalitarians are different.  They demand not only obedience but lockstep belief.  In some sense they combine authoritarian government with a sort of secular church where attendance every Sunday is required and no heresy of any sort is permitted.  Everything is political and there is no space where the regime does not watch and listen.   Even the smallest private dissent from the ruling orthodoxy is not permitted.  Terror from the state keeps everyone in line.

I have tried out a lot of words in my head that are less inflammatory than "totalitarian" to describe the more radical social justice elements on modern college campuses, but I can't find a word that is a better fit.  The attempts to drive out dissenting voices through modern forms of social-media-fueled mob terror are both scary and extremely disheartening.

I was thinking about all this in reading an article about Camille Paglia and the students and faculty of her own university who are trying to get her thrown out.  I find Paglia to be consistently fascinating, for the very reason that the way her mind works, the topics she chooses to focus on, and sometimes the conclusions she draws are very different from my own experience.  The best way to describe her, I think, is that we have traditional axes of thought and she is somewhere off-axis.

Anyway, after horrifying Conservatives for many decades, Paglia has over the last few years run afoul of the totalitarian Left.  One example: (emphasis added)

Camille Paglia, the controversial literary and social critic who identifies both as queer and trans, is drawing fire yet again. Students at her own institution, the University of the Arts (UArts) in Philadelphia, are calling for her to be fired. An online petition, currently with over 1,300 signatures, reads in part:

Camille Paglia should be removed from UArts faculty and replaced by a queer person of color. If, due to tenure, it is absolutely illegal to remove her, then the University must at least offer alternate sections of the classes she teaches, instead taught by professors who respect transgender students and survivors of sexual assault.

Another demand in the petition is that, if she can't be canned, the university will stop selling Paglia's books on campus and permanently disallow her from speaking on campus outside of her own classes. Although it's mostly non-faculty speakers who get deplatformed, Paglia is merely the latest target being attacked by students from her own institution. Students at Sarah Lawrence, for instance, are calling for political scientist Samuel Abrams to be fired for writing an op-ed in The New York Times calling for ideological diversity among administrators.

Paglia's critics claim that, despite her own alternative sexual identity, she is so hostile and bigoted towards trans people that her mere presence on campus constitutes an insult or threat. There's no question that she has been dismissive of some claims made by trans people and, even more so, dismissive of students who claim that being subjected to speech with which they disagree is a form of trauma.

What I got to thinking about is this:  How far away are we from "her mere presence on campus" constituting a threat to being threatened by "her mere presence in the same country?"  I fear it may not be very long.

Postscripts:  I wanted to add a couple of postscripts to this story

1. I find that the "mere presence is a threat" argument being deployed by LGBT activists is extremely ironic.  In the camping business I run we have always had a disproportionate number of gay couples managing individual campgrounds.   Fifteen years ago I remember twice getting push back from people in the surrounding community (both times in southern, more traditionally religious areas) that the very presence of gay men around young children constituted a threat.  I thought this argument was complete nonsense and basically told the protesters to pound sand.  But it is ironic for me to now hear LGBT activists deploying the "mere presences is a threat" argument that has been used against them so often in history
2. We have clearly dumbed down what constitutes a threat when speech is equated with violence.  But have we also dumbed down the concept of terror?  People -- particularly university administrators but you see it all over -- constantly fold under the pressure of negative comments on twitter.  This sure seems a long way from the SS showing up at your door at 4AM, but amazingly social media terror seems to be nearly as effective an instrument of control.  Years ago my dad ran a major oil company and he did it with a real sense of mission, that they were doing great things to keep the world running.  But he endured endless bombing threats, kidnapping threats, existential threats from Congress, screaming protests at his doorstep, etc.  After being personally listed on the Unibomber's target list, I wonder what he would think about the "threat" of social media mobbing.

I have spent pretty much zero minutes paying attention to the Kardashian women (I think I saw them more in the "People vs. OJ Simpson" than I have in all other media combined).  But I have great respect for how Kim Kardashian is spending her celebrity credit.  She seems to be doing real work that helps real people on an important issue, and one that does not give her the immediate virtue signalling credit as, say, making uniformed statements about the climate might.

Kim Kardashian West is staying true to her pledge to fight for prison reform.

CNN has learned that the E! star has been quietly working behind the scenes over the past three months to help commute the life sentences of 17 first-time nonviolent drug offenders.

Brittany K. Barnett, Kardashian West's personal attorney and co-founder of the Buried Alive Project, and MiAngel Cody, lead counsel of the The Decarceration Collective, told CNN that Kardashian West has been instrumental in the release of these inmates.

"Kim has been funding this project and (has been) a very important supporter of our 90 Days of Freedom campaign as part of the First Step Act, which President Trump signed into law last year," Cody said. "We've been going around the country in courtrooms and asking judges to release these inmates."

Barnett added that without Kardashian West footing the bill, this would not have been possible. "(Kim) has provided financial support to cover legal fees so that we can travel the country. Our relationships with our clients don't end when they are freed. (Kim) is truly dedicated to the issue. I work personally with her, we are really grateful."

But she's not just paying legal fees.

"When people get out of prison, they might be incarcerated hundreds of miles from their families and they might need help getting home. Really important, critical things that people might not realize -- and those are things Kim is helping with as well," Cody added.

OFTEN WRONG, NEVER IN DOUBT: New Research Confirms We Got Cholesterol All Wrong: The U.S. government has pushed a lot of bad nutrition advice over the years. Maybe it should stop advising us on what to eat.