Jts5665

1. Number of new driver jobs created every month: 20,000

2. Amount of annual economic activity generated by Uber: $2.8 billion

3. Average Uber pickup time: Less than 10 minutes

4. Number of Americans who have Uber available to them: 137,451,000 (43% of the US population)

5. Number of years Uber has been in business: 4

6. Number of cities worldwide where Uber is available: 100

7. Median income of UberX drivers in NYC and San Francisco: $90,766 and $74,191

8. UberX fares compared to regular “cartel” taxis: 15% to 34% depending on the city and 26% on average across all Uber cities

9. Decrease in DUI arrests in Seattle following the entrance of Uber: More than 10%

10. Decrease in taxi crime in the city of Chicago in the 300 days following the entrance of Uber: 20%

Sources: Uber website and the Uber blog.

Chris Edwards

Peggy Noonan’s op-ed on the weekend was titled “The VA Scandal Is a Crisis of Leadership.” Noonan discusses how President Obama “doesn’t do the plodding, unshowy, unromantic work of making government work.” Obama is not a good manager, and so scandals like the current one are to be expected.

I enjoy Noonan’s articles and her observations on Obama’s style are right on target, but her view about why the VA scandal happened is off the mark. The president does seem to spend his time giving speeches, strategizing politics, and playing golf rather than rolling up his shirt sleeves and fixing programs. He does seem to be “a show horse, not a workhorse,” as Noonan says. But that’s not why the VA scandal happened.

The VA situation is appalling, but it has common elements with scandals that happen under every president. Those elements include bureaucrats behaving selfishly, politicians promising reforms and not following through, federal workforce dysfunction, and the failed central planning of a complex industry. The VA scandal happened because the government is a giant monopoly with none of the built-in checks of the marketplace. Federal politicians themselves are not a check because they are too distracted and the government is far too large for them to keep track of.

Noonan says, “the president is an executive, and executives manage.” Really? He could efficiently manage the entire $3.5 trillion government and its 2.1 million workers and 2,200 programs? I doubt it. I think we could vote in the head of PWC as the next president, and we would still have scandal after scandal in Washington.

Noonan worked in the Reagan administration, and so she remembers the 1980’s HUD scandal. The shenanigans, waste, and bad behavior under Reagan’s HUD secretary Sam Pierce over eight years were jaw-dropping. HUD under Pierce was a cronyism factory for the secretary’s buddies and Republican donors. Tad DeHaven discusses the abuses in this essay.

Perhaps Ronald Reagan should have been a better manager. But he understood that the problem in Washington is far deeper than just a need to run things better, as many of his famous comments reveal:

“Government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem.”

“No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. So governments’ programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.”

“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

As we noted last week, it was really the trial lawyers (with some help from pharma) that killed patent reform. While patent trolling operations and some big legacy companies with giant patent portfolios had been fighting against patent reform all along, they weren't responsible for killing it outright. In fact, in talking to many people involved, the same story comes up again and again: pretty much everyone was negotiating on a deal -- and, at the last minute, the trial lawyers called Harry Reid, who told Leahy to kill the bill. Joe Mullin quotes a tech industry lobbyist who notes that "I feel like a mouse who never knew he was a mouse," and that despite all the negotiating, the trial lawyers just put an end to it:

"We felt really good the last couple of days," said the tech lobbyist. "It was a good deal—one we could live with. Then the trial lawyers and pharma went to Senator Reid late this morning and said that's it. Enough with the children playing in the playground—go kill it."

Some have asked why trial lawyers (rather than patent lawyers) were so against it, and the key thing is that the trial lawyers don't want anything to do with fee shifting. They fear, greatly, that if fee shifting is shown to be effective in patent cases, it will then make it easier to spread to other types of cases. This isn't a huge surprise. Nearly a year ago, a high ranking Democratic Congressional staffer told me flat out that "fee shifting has to be off the table" because "the trial lawyers will never allow it." I was actually surprised that it stayed in the bill as long as it did.

But here's the thing: having the trial lawyers kill the bill outright may be incredibly shortsighted. That's because this bill was already pretty weak overall. All that "bipartisan negotiating" and lobbying pressure from patent trolling operations (and big tech firms who didn't want to lose the ability to exploit giant portfolios of bad patents) had basically weakened this bill drastically already. Even the fee shifting was pretty limited and unlikely to have a huge impact.

But the problem of patent trolls still remains.

And here's the big thing. The Republicans are very much in favor of patent reform, and many prognosticators expect the Republicans to take control of the Senate in this year's elections. As lawyer Matt Johnson points out, with the Republicans in control over both houses, much stronger patent reform might go through in the next Congress, and there won't be much the trial lawyers will be able to do about it. Republicans aren't known for bending to the whims of trial lawyers.

In the interest of making a deal with Democrats this year, Cornyn offered major concessions on fee-shifting, heightened pleading, and discovery abuse during his negotiations with Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY). Those concessions won’t necessarily be on the table next year in a GOP-controlled Senate. And House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte may similarly be unmotivated to make concessions with Democrats in his chamber. Moreover, the trial bar certainly can’t count on the President to be a backstop. President Obama has championed many of the litigation reforms they oppose, including loser-pays and heightened pleading standards.

Reform opponents made the calculation that they’ll take their chances in 2015 rather than swallow a bipartisan compromise this year.

As he says, "this year’s Schumer-Cornyn deal is probably as good as it gets" for those looking to limit patent reform. Next year, the trial lawyers may be able to call Harry Reid, but it might not matter at all.

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In two separate TV interviews, Secretary of State John Kerry made some ridiculous arguments about how Ed Snowden should "man up" and come back to the US. This was in response to Snowden's claims that the only reason he's in Russia is the US State Department pulling his passport -- an argument that no one in the US government has ever denied. Given the chance to respond to this, Kerry effectively changed the subject, saying that Snowden can and should come home to face charges. Here was his statement on NBC's Today show:

QUESTION: Well, Mr. Secretary, what about it? Does he have a point? He’s basically saying but for the U.S. State Department revoking his passport, he wouldn’t be in Russia at all.

SECRETARY KERRY: Well, for a supposedly smart guy, that’s a pretty dumb answer, frankly. Look, I’m not going to get into the – who he was, what he was. Let me just say this: If Mr. Snowden wants to come back to the United States today, we’ll have him on a flight today. We’d be delighted for him to come back. And he should come back, and that’s what a patriot would do. A patriot would not run away and look for refuge in Russia or Cuba or some other country. A patriot would stand up in the United States and make his case to the American people. But he’s refused to do that to this date, at least.

The fact is that he can come home, but he’s a fugitive from justice, which is why he’s not being permitted to fly around the world. It’s that simple and he knows it.

QUESTION: Have you softened your stance at all with regard to his alleged conduct here? I noticed earlier this year you said that there were disclosures about the NSA made because of Snowden that you yourself were not aware of that constituted NSA overreach. Does that change the calculus at all for you?

SECRETARY KERRY: That’s entirely up to the justice system. Let him come back and make his case. The fact is that he should – if he cares so much about America and he believes in America, he should trust in the American system of justice. But to be hiding in Russia, an authoritarian country, and to have just admitted that he was really trying to get to Cuba, I mean, what does that tell you, really? I think he’s confused. I think it’s very sad.

But this is a man who has done great damage to his country, violated his oath which he took when he became an employee, and yes, in fact, stole an enormous amount of information and released it to the public, to the detriment of his country.

Then, in an interview with CBS he effectively said the same thing, including the ridiculous "man up" statement, which is perhaps even stronger than his silly "that's what a patriot would do" statement above:

QUESTION: Mr. Secretary, let me ask you about Edward Snowden. He has now given an interview in which he says he was trained by the United States as a spy. How damaging is this disclosure?

SECRETARY KERRY: Well, it’s not – it’s the same disclosure that everybody’s known. He very cleverly wraps it into his language about: I was a technical person; I didn’t go out there and work with humans, with other people; I wasn’t working and interacting with human beings. Basically, what he was doing is computer stuff, and that’s exactly what he says. So he wraps it into this larger language.

The bottom line is this is a man who has betrayed his country, who is sitting in Russia, an authoritarian country, where he has taken refuge. He should man up and come back to the United States if he has a complaint about what’s the matter with American surveillance, come back here and stand in our system of justice and make his case. But instead he is just sitting there taking potshots at his country, violating his oath that he took when he took on the job he took, and betraying, I think, the fundamental agreement that he entered into when he became an employee. And the fact is he has damaged his country very significantly in many, many ways. He has hurt operational security. He has told terrorists what they can now do to be able to avoid detection. And I find it sad and disgraceful.

I'm not even going to touch "what he was doing is computer stuff" quote, because that just kind of speaks for itself, doesn't it?

But of course, for all this "manly" (actually: sexist and misogynistic) talk, Secretary Kerry is being dishonest and disingenuous. As we've detailed a few times now, Snowden has been charged under the Espionage Act and, as such, he is not allowed to present a "public interest" or "whistleblowing" defense. His motive isn't even allowed to be used in the case at all. So all this talk about "making his case" is ridiculous. Snowden knows damn well that "our system of justice" on issues like this is inherently unfair and biased. Kevin Gosztola has highlighted examples of others who stayed and "made their case" under Espionage Act charges, showing how they were railroaded by a system that is not fair and does not allow them to actually present their case.

Similarly, as one of Snowden's legal advisors, Ben Wizner of the ACLU, points out, no matter what Kerry claims above, Snowden isn't dumb:

“He isn’t blind,” Wizner said. “Snowden saw what happened to other people who faced prosecution under the Espionage Act, and he saw the state of the law, which would not have allowed him to either to challenge the government’s improper withholding of this information in the first place, or to hold up the enormous public value of these disclosures. All that would have been irrelevant.”

So if we're going to use ridiculous misogynistic phrases like "man up," can we at least ask if Secretary Kerry will "man up" and admit that his claims about what Snowden would face back home were not even close to accurate? Or do real "men" like Secretary Kerry think it's appropriate to aggressively lie and mislead the American public? If so, perhaps it's time for someone to "woman up" instead. Though, as Glenn Greenwald points out, Kerry appears to be arguing that a female whistleblower in Snowden's shoes "wouldn't have the same obligation to return home." Or, perhaps (just perhaps) none of this has anything to do with manliness, and folks in the government could stop the macho aggressive bullshit and actually deal with the reality: Snowden blew the whistle on a program that all three branches of government have now admitted were illegal (and potentially unconstitutional). If someone has to "face the music," shouldn't it be the US government?

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David Brooks openly calls for "constant garden-tending", or in other words, an ongoing state of aggressively militaristic global policing by the United States:

As Robert Kagan shows in a brilliant essay in The New Republic, for the past 70 years, American policy makers have understood that underreach can lead to catastrophe, too. Presidents assertively tended the international garden so that small problems didn’t turn into big ones, even when core national interests were not at stake. In the 1990s, for example, President George H.W. Bush and President Clinton took military action roughly every 17 months to restrain dictators, spread democracy and preserve international norms.

This sort of forward-leaning interventionist garden-tending will be even more necessary in an age of assertive autocracies. If the U.S. restricts intervention to “core interests,” as Obama suggests, if it neglects constant garden-tending, the thugs will grab and grab and eventually there will be horrendous conflagrations. America’s assertive responses will not need to be military; they rarely will be. But they’ll need to be simple, strong acts of deterrence to preserve order.

This is insane and this is wrong. The reason that "the number of countries that moved in an autocratic direction has outnumbered those that moved in a democratic one" has been because the supposedly democratic countries have demonstrated to all and sundry that they are not democratic at all. The United States, Italy, Greece, Ukraine, Ireland, France, the UK, and above all, the European Union, have proven, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that their "democracy" is a sham.

Switzerland is the only genuinely democratic country in Europe. It is the only country where the will of the people can actually, at times, override the will of the government elite. The government there has voted twice to join the EU. The people voted it down twice and that is why Switzerland is not in the EU. Contrast that with, for example, the UK, where the people have never voted to join the EU and the government has repeatedly lied to them and denied them the opportunity to decide for themselves if they wish to belong to it. Or Ireland, where they voted down the Lisbon Treaty, then were forced to vote again until the will of the Irish elite had been accomplished. Or the USA, where one of the largest invasions in human history - 50 million strong - was aided and abetted by the three branches of government.

The concept of representative democracy has failed abysmally. It is no wonder that people are now trying other options. It's hard to believe that Brooks is crazy enough to demand the US engage in national sovereignty-violating military action twice every three years. This is the madness of the neocons reaching terminal velocity.

New federal database will include 227 million Americans' SSNs, entire credit history...


(Third column, 7th story, link)

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COP: Bosses target young drivers, want ticket quotas...


(Third column, 12th story, link)

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Children as Young as Five Labeled 'Suspicious' by Florida Police...

Walter Olson

Wow, more of this please [St. Paul Pioneer Press]:

It’s no longer a crime in Minnesota to carry fruit in an illegally sized container. The state’s telegraph regulations are gone. And it’s now legal to drive a car in neutral — if you can figure out how to do it.

Those were among the 1,175 obsolete, unnecessary and incomprehensible laws that Gov. Mark Dayton and the Legislature repealed this year as part of the governor’s “unsession” initiative. His goal was to make state government work better, faster and smarter….

In addition to getting rid of outdated laws, the project made taxes simpler, cut bureaucratic red tape, speeded up business permits and required state agencies to communicate in plain language.

If lawmakers in Minnesota could identify 1,175 worthless or outdated laws that could be rooted out with little real political resistance, imagine how many other worthless or outdated laws there are that are not so easy to uproot because they work to the benefit of one group or other.

(Don Boudreaux)

From The Spectator comes this thoughtful comparison of the worldview of Deirdre McCloskey with that of Thomas Piketty.  (HT my Mercatus Center colleague Bob Graboyes)

McCloskey, by contrast, has long argued that economists are far too preoccupied by capital and saving. She doesn’t even like the word capitalism, on the grounds that capital is not what got us where we are today. ‘If Scotland is trying to become Holland, then capital accumulation is how to do it. That will double your income, maybe triple it.’ But for her, that sort of accumulation is a scratch-card-sized prize — and the lottery jackpot beckons. She enthuses about the Great Enrichment of the 19th century. ‘What happened, understand, is not 100 per cent growth, but anywhere from 2,900 per cent growth to 9,900 per cent growth. A factor of either 30 or 100.’

That jump in incomes came about not through thrift, she says, but through a shift to liberal bourgeois values that put an emphasis on the business of innovation. In place of capitalism, she talks of ‘market-tested innovation and supply’ as the active ingredient of our economic system. It is incidentally a system ‘drenched’ in values and ethics overlooked by economists.

Professor McCloskey has a point, of course. Think of the Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, big wealth accumulators in recent times. It wasn’t the magic of compound interest on capital that made them rich; it was intellectual property. They created billions of dollars of business from virtually nothing at all. If you measure the profits as a return on the small amount of initial capital invested, then it looks huge; but capital was no more important an ingredient of the original Apple or Microsoft than cookies or cucumbers.

An important insight – central to the story of modern economic growth told by deeply insightful scholars such as Schumpeter, Mises, Hayek, Lachmann, Kirzner, and McCloskey, but which is lost on thinkers such as Piketty – is the following: indispensable to our modern prosperity is not only the innovative creation of capital but also the continual destruction of capital that such successful innovation entails.  Creative destruction.  What is destroyed is not only some jobs (e.g., t.v. repairman) and the value of some consumer goods (e.g., crutches for polio victims) and services (e.g., postal delivery), but also the value of capital.

Capitalism’s nature is not, contrary to Piketty’s claim, to forever protect and augment existing capital.  Central to capitalism’s nature is what McCloskey calls “market-tested innovation.”  And this innovation inevitably destroys the value of older, less-productive capital that is in competition with with it – in competition with the new capital, the new goods, the new production and consumption processes, and the new knowledge that innovative entrepreneurs create.

Piketty’s apparent obliviousness to this central feature of market-driven capitalism creates a foundational flaw in his celebrated book.

You know that relative of yours, who last Thanksgiving called you anti-science because you had not fully bought into global warming alarm?

Well, it appears that the reason we keep getting called "anti-science" is because climate scientists have a really funny idea of what exactly "science" is.

Apparently, a number of folks have been trying for years to get articles published in peer reviewed journals comparing the IPCC temperature models to actual measurements, and in the process highlighting the divergence of the two.  And they keep getting rejected.

Now, the publisher of Environmental Research Letters has explained why.  Apparently, in climate science it is "an error" to attempt to compare computer temperature forecasts with the temperatures that actually occurred.  In fact, he says that trying to do so "is harmful as it opens the door for oversimplified claims of 'errors' and worse from the climate sceptics media side".  Apparently, the purpose of scientific inquiry is to win media wars, and not necessarily to discover truth.

Here is something everyone in climate should remember:  The output of models merely represents a hypothesis.  When we have complicated hypotheses in complicated systems, and where such hypotheses may encompass many interrelated assumptions, computer models are an important tool for playing out, computationally, what results those hypotheses might translate to in the physical world.  It is no different than if Newton had had a computer and took his equation Gmm/R^2 and used the computer to project future orbits for the Earth and other planets (which he and others did, but by hand).   But these projections would have no value until they were checked against actual observations.  That is how we knew we liked Newton's models better than Ptolemy's -- because they checked out better against actual measurements.

But climate scientists are trying to create some kind of weird world where model results have some sort of independent reality, where in fact the model results should be trusted over measurements when the two diverge.  If this is science -- which it is not -- but if it were, then I would be anti-science.

Bruce McQuain has an article on how McDonald's is closing some contract-operated fast food outlets at military bases.  The article speculates that the closures on new government minimum wage regulations for government contracts.

Frankly, I doubt this explanation.  I know something of the world of government contracting, and contractors in these cases routinely just pass on wage increases to their customers in the form of higher prices.  After all, their contracts give them a monopoly of sorts in these bases.

I would like to offer an alternative explanation.

In March, a new regulation took effect that all contractors with anything larger than a $50,000 a year contract with the government must go through an expensive affirmative action planning process for ALL of their locations, not just for the people involved in that particular contract (41 CFR 60-2.1  and 41 CFR 60-4.1)

We don't do government contracting work.  We lease government facilities, but get paid 100% by customers -- since we don't take government money, we are not a contractor.  But there is one exception.  We have a $52,000 a year contract to clean bathrooms near the campgrounds we operate in California.  Basically, we bid this contract at cost because we want the bathrooms cleaned well -- if they are not, it hurts our nearby businesses.

In this contract, we have government-mandated wage requirements under the Service Contract Act.  When these mandated wages go up, we just raise the price to the government in proportion.  No big deal.

We were informed that having this contract, under the new March Obama regulations, now made us liable to go through an expensive and time consuming affirmative action planning process for every location -- of which we have over 120 -- not just for this one contract.  So this one contract was going to force us to create 120 annual written plans and presumably get them approved by someone in the government.  No way.  I might have done it if I only had to do a plan for the contract, but it is just too much work to do this everywhere merely because I have a $52,000 contract on which I make no profit.  So we told the Feds we were dropping the contract.

I think it is very unlikely that private businesses will be accepting government contracts as 5 or 10% of their business any more.   This new regulation just imposes too much cost on the other 95% of the business.  Many will drop the government contracts.

I wonder if this is what is really going on with McDonalds.  A regulatory requirement that applied just to the base operations, like a minimum wage, strikes me as manageable.  But having these three or four contracts drive an expensive requirement to create some sort of affirmative action plan for every location - essentially every one of their tens of thousands of stores, so tens of thousands of plans - that would drive them out of these contracts VERY fast.

Submitted by Mike Krieger of Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

It’s shameful that the president of the United States, the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and the leaders of the country’s surveillance agencies refuse to accept consensus reforms that will keep our country safe while upholding the Constitution. And it mocks our system of government that they worked to gut key provisions of the Freedom Act behind closed doors.

 

- Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan, original cosponsor of the USA Freedom Act

In what will come as no surprise to any of you, there are very few members of Congress I have even the slightest degree of respect for. However, Justin Amash is one of them.

Rep. Amash is 34 years old and was first elected to Congress in 2010. He has been on my radar screen for several years now as one of the few elected representatives who act more like statesmen than politicians. He has been on the right side of many civil liberties related issues, including his opposition to the NDAA’s provision that allows for the indefinite detention of American citizens without a trial. More recently, last summer he authored an anti-NSA amendment known as the “Amash Amendment,” which was defeated by establishment authoritarians in both political parties. I covered that story in my post: NSA Holds “Top Secret” Meeting to Stop Powerful Anti-Spying Amendment.

Being the fighter that he is, Amash regrouped and came back with an anti-NSA spying bill with some teeth to it: The USA Freedom Act. This bill concerned the establishment to such a degree that Senator Feinstein launched her own competing bill, which believe it or not, intended to codify the NSA’s unconstitutional practices into law.

In the end, what the status quo did was water down the once robust USA Freedom Act into oblivion. Don’t take my word for it, Justin Amash wrote the following on his Facebook page:

Today, I will vote no on ?#‎HR3361?, the ?#‎USAFREEDOMAct?.

 

I am an original cosponsor of the Freedom Act, and I was involved in its drafting. At its best, the Freedom Act would have reined in the government’s unconstitutional domestic spying programs, ended the indiscriminate collection of Americans’ private records, and made the secret FISA court function more like a real court—with real arguments and real adversaries.

 

I was and am proud of the work our group, led by Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, did to promote this legislation, as originally drafted.

 

However, the revised bill that makes its way to the House floor this morning doesn’t look much like the Freedom Act.

 

This morning’s bill maintains and codifies a large-scale, unconstitutional domestic spying program. It claims to end “bulk collection” of Americans’ data only in a very technical sense: The bill prohibits the government from, for example, ordering a telephone company to turn over all its call records every day.

 

But the bill was so weakened in behind-the-scenes negotiations over the last week that the government still can order—without probable cause—a telephone company to turn over all call records for “area code 616″ or for “phone calls made east of the Mississippi.” The bill green-lights the government’s massive data collection activities that sweep up Americans’ records in violation of the Fourth Amendment.

 

The bill does include a few modest improvements to current law. The secret FISA court that approves government surveillance must publish its most significant opinions so that Americans can have some idea of what surveillance the government is doing. The bill authorizes (but does not require) the FISA court to appoint lawyers to argue for Americans’ privacy rights, whereas the court now only hears from one side before ruling.

 

But while the original version of the Freedom Act allowed Sec. 215 of the Patriot Act to expire in June 2015, this morning’s bill extends the life of that controversial section for more than two years, through 2017.

 

I thank Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte for pursuing surveillance reform. I respect Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner and Rep. John Conyers for their work on this issue.

 

It’s shameful that the president of the United States, the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and the leaders of the country’s surveillance agencies refuse to accept consensus reforms that will keep our country safe while upholding the Constitution. And it mocks our system of government that they worked to gut key provisions of the Freedom Act behind closed doors.

 

The American people demand that the Constitution be respected, that our rights and liberties be secured, and that the government stay out of our private lives. Fortunately, there is a growing group of representatives on both sides of the aisle who get it. In the 10 months since I proposed the Amash Amendment to end mass surveillance, we’ve made big gains.

We will succeed.

So it is this watered down, toothless bill that passed this morning. Just in case you still had any doubt what the cretins in Congress are all about. As Mark Twain famously stated:

“There is no distinctly American criminal class - except Congress.”

As we've pointed out many times in the past, the originally stated purpose of copyright law was to encourage the sharing of scientific knowledge for the purpose of learning. The first copyright act in the US was actually entitled "for the encouragement of learning." Yet, as copyright law has evolved, it's frequently been used to make learning much more difficult. Just a few months ago, we covered how publishing giant Elsevier had started to demand that academics who had published their own research on Academia.edu take down those works. As we noted then, while big journal publishers often demand that academics hand over their copyright in order to get published, they usually would either grant an exception for an academic to post their own work, or at least look the other way when the academics would do so. And many, many academics obviously decided to post their own papers to the web.

As TorrentFreak reports, the American Society of Civil Engineers has taken it up a level, hiring one of the more well-known copyright enforcement companies out there, Digimarc, to go around issuing DMCA takedown on academics uploading their own works:

The publisher has hired the piracy protection firm Digimarc to police the internet for articles that are posted in the wild. As a result, universities all across the globe were targeted with takedown notices, which were also sent to Google in some cases.

The list of rogue researchers is long, and includes professors from MIT, Stanford, Northwestern University, University of Washington, UC Berkeley, University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin–Madison and many international universities.

Yes, basically, ASCE has declared that its own academic authors are a bunch of pirates. If you're a civil engineer, now is the time to start looking seriously at alternatives for publishing beyond the ASCE. Declaring war on the academics who provide you all of your content for free, just seems like a bad idea.

Torrentfreak notes that it appears that some universities have resisted these takedown demands. Stanford, MIT and UC Berkeley still have the works in question up. Other schools, however, have quickly caved in. University of Wisconsin-Madison and University of Texas-Austin appear to have pulled down the works. Because, you can't support the progress of science if your damn academics are giving away their works for free... instead of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for access to basic knowledge and research.

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Walter Olson

The calendar of saints sets aside this day, May 20, as the feast of St. Bernardine of Siena, famous across Renaissance Italy for his impassioned sermons against what he saw as the luxury, vice and corruption of his times, especially usury (the lending of money at interest). While opposition to usury has faded in the West – we now recognize interest-charging as a foundation stone of capitalism and modern economics generally – Bernardine is still invoked on behalf of such causes as relief from respiratory ailments, help for compulsive gamblers, the welfare of the California city of San Bernardino, and, of interest here, the fields of advertising and public relations. The scope of public relations is often taken to include lobbying, and it’s as a forerunner of modern lobbyists that Bernardine appears in a tale, fanciful or otherwise, told a century ago: 

A comic incident throwing light upon Bernardine’s attitude toward usurers is reported in an old chronicle. While preaching at Milan, he was often visited by a merchant who urged our saint to inveigh so strenuously against usury as to render it obnoxious in the eyes of all. On making inquiries, however, the latter ascertained his visitor to be himself the greatest usurer of the place, whose action in this matter was prompted by a wish to lessen the number of his competitors by inspiring them with a wholesome horror of the trade.

Our own era, as we know, is one in which moralistic attacks on gambling have been secretly backed by nearby casino proprietors who don’t want the competition, in which “the estate-planning industry [has lobbied] hard against a [reduced federal] estate tax, which would kill its costly tax-avoidance schemes,” and in which various energy producers quietly assist environmental and NIMBY resistance to projects advancing competing sources of energy.  My colleague Chris Edwards has compiled many more examples. You have to wonder whether much has really changed since Bernardine’s time. 

 

Marian L. Tupy

Today marks 141 years since the U.S. government issued Levi Strauss & Co. a patent for the first blue jeans. Back in 1873, the jeans cost $13.10, which would be $251.18 in 2013 dollars.

If you go on Levi’s website today, you will be able to purchase their original-model 501 jeans for $68 and the Levi corporation will ship your new purchase anywhere in the United States for free.

That’s a 73 percent reduction in real price. That’s capitalism. That’s progress.

You can find more on prices over time at www.humanprogress.org.

Now that I’ve wrapped up the software project that’s been dominating my time and prompted me to skip this year’s low-carb cruise, I finally got around to finishing Denise Minger’s first book, Death by Food Pyramid.  Wow. Let’s just say it was worth the wait.

The book’s subtitle is How Shoddy Science, Sketchy Politics and Shady Special Interests Ruined Your Health … and How to Reclaim It, which pretty much describes the story presented in the 200-plus pages.  As she explained during her presentation on the low-carb cruise a couple of years ago, Minger isn’t a low-carber and doesn’t promote any particular diet other than a nutrient-dense diet.  So although there’s a section on the commonalities of diets shown to improve health, this isn’t a diet book.  It’s more of a history book, and the details Minger dug up about how the Food Pyramid and the USDA’s dietary guidelines were developed are fascinating.

In Fat Head, I gave a (very) brief version of the story in the section that began with Ancel Keys, continued through the McGovern Committee hearings and ended with the USDA Food Pyramid.  Death by Food Pyramid presents the much deeper, much richer version.  I learned quite a bit of new information about how the Food Pyramid came to be.  Reading the story in such detail also prompted more than a few head-bang-on-desk moments.

Early in the book, Minger recounts the experience of Luise Light, who was appointed to the position of Director of Dietary Guidance and Nutrition Education Research in the late 1970s – meaning she was officially put in charge of replacing the old “Basic Four” government dietary guidelines with something new and improved.  In one of the book’s many “you’ve got to be @#$%ing kidding me!” moments, we learn that Light did, in fact, develop recommendations based on actual science:

Unlike previous food guides, Light’s version cracked down ruthlessly on empty calories and health-depleting junk food.  The new guide’s base was a safari through the produce department – five to nine servings of fresh fruits and vegetables each day.  “Protein foods” like meats, eggs, nuts and beans came in at five to seven ounces daily; for dairy, two to three servings were advised.

Light’s guidelines weren’t based on fat-phobia and didn’t promote hearthealthywholegrains as health food:

The guide kept sugar well below 10 percent of total calories and strictly limited refined carbohydrates, with white-flour products like crackers, bagels, and bread rolls shoved into the guide’s no-bueno zone alongside candy and junk food.  And the kicker:  grains were pruned down to a maximum of two to three servings per day, always in whole form.

… Satisfied that their recommendations were scientifically sound and economically feasible, Light’s team shipped the new food guide off to the Secretary of Agriculture’s office for review.  And that’s when the trouble began.

Well, I guess trouble is what you get when you send the Secretary of Monsanto … er, excuse me, the Secretary of Agriculture a document suggesting people limit their grain consumption.  When Light received the (ahem) edited version of her guidelines back from the USDA, they were a grain-promoting perversion of what she’d originally submitted.  Horrified, Light explained that “no one needs that much bread and cereal in a day unless they are longshoremen or football players” and warned that the six-to-eleven servings of grain per day recommended by the USDA could spark epidemics of obesity and diabetes.

And the rest is history.

Other than the desire to sell more corn and wheat, why would the USDA ignore its own nutrition guru and promote a diet based on grains?  The answer shouldn’t have surprised me, and yet it did:

The only justification she’d been given was that the changes would help curb the cost of the food stamp program:  fruits and vegetables were expensive, the head of Light’s division explained – and from a nutritional standpoint, the USDA considered them somewhat interchangeable with grains.  Emphasizing the latter in the American diet would help food assistance programs stay within budget.

How’s that for typical government logic?  We have a government-subsidized food stamp program, but paying for foods that are actually good for people is too expensive, so we’ll just declare cheap grains to be a health food in our new guidelines.  Later, of course, we’ll impose those guidelines on schools and other government facilities.  Let’s make everyone eat survival food for poor people.

Yes, I know:  you really want to bang your head on your desk right now … and we’re only up to page 24 in the book.

The USDA takes on the Darth Vader role again later in a chapter about trans fats.  After recounting the history of Crisco and how it triumphed over lard in the American kitchen (thanks in part to Upton Sinclair scaring people away from meat products with his fictional book The Jungle), Minger explains that scientists began recognizing the possible health hazards of hydrogenated oils as far back as the 1950s.  By the 1990s, the evidence was clear:  trans fats were bad news for health.

So how did our great health protectors at the USDA deal with that evidence?  I’m sure you can guess.  One USDA scientist wanted to publish a paper warning about trans fats, but the USDA suppressed the document and continued warning Americans about saturated fats instead.  As Minger writes:

The food pyramid’s pamphlet – beneath the heading “Are some types of fat worse than others?” – stated only to limit saturated fat to less than 10 percent of total calories because it could raise cholesterol and cause heart disease … And worse, the pamphlet specifically advised consumers to tilt their fat choices towards margarines with “vegetable oil” listed as their first ingredient, effectively steering folks toward some of the richest sources of trans fat in existence.

Boy, if only we could put the feds in charge of everyone’s health care.  Given our government’s history in health matters, I know they’d do a wonderful job.

If you’ve read her takedown of the China Study (among many other excellent posts) you know Minger is a science geek.  So not surprisingly, she devotes an early chapter to explaining health science so the reader can understand how bad science led to the anti-fat, anti-cholesterol beliefs that still plague our dietary recommendations today.

As you’d expect, the Shoddy Science chapters feature our old friend Ancel Keys, but Minger’s portrayal of the man is much more nuanced (and therefore more accurate) than the brief treatment I gave him in Fat Head.  While many of us consider Keys a villain and John Yudkin (the anti-sugar researcher who wrote Pure, White and Deadly) a hero, Minger sees them more as mirror images of each other.  Both were egotistical, both relied on observational and sometimes cherry-picked evidence when it suited them, both spent a lot of time and energy insulting each other, and both also conducted some good, solid science during their long careers.

Looking at both the strengths and weaknesses of their research, Minger concludes that each man was too focused on one part of the puzzle.  Both may have been partly right and partly wrong:

Here’s the problem with the theories of both Yudkin and Keys:  they each tried to incriminate a single macronutrient without considering the bigger picture.  This type of tunnel vision still infects the research world today.  Indeed, the context in which saturated fat and sugar are consumed can determine their ultimate effects on one’s health.  For example, saturated fat may be benign in diets free from industrially processed foods… But add it to a diet swimming in refined grains, excess calories and high fructose corn syrup, and it might act out of character in health-harming ways.  Similarly, it’s possible that sugar unleashes its most vicious damage in the context of our modern, highly processed diet.

Minger goes on to cite research suggesting that saturated fat only becomes harmful when it’s dumped into a metabolic soup of inflammation and excess carbohydrates.  So take a bit of saturated fat and mix it up with inflammation-producing refined grains and inflammation-producing vegetable oils – in other words, consume the diet the USDA was busy promoting as healthy – and you’ve set yourself up for trouble … or Death by Food Pyramid.

In a later chapter, Minger examines three of the popular diets that have proven their power to help people overcome health problems – whole food plant-based, Mediterranean, and paleo/primal – and highlights their similarities.  All include whole, unprocessed foods such as tubers, vegetables and low-glycemic fruits.  All exclude sugar, refined grains and processed vegetable oils.  In other words, all three return us to something closer to our ancestral diets – at least if our starting point is the Standard American Diet.

Minger doesn’t pronounce any diet the winner of the health sweepstakes.  In a brief chapter about the work of Dr. Weston A. Price, she points out that he found people have thrived on a variety of diets around the world:  ancestral diets in Switzerland were rich in grass-fed dairy products; Native Americans in the Rocky Mountain regions lived largely on wild game (eating nose to tail and often discarding much of the muscle meat); Inuits and other northern peoples consumed a diet rich in seafood; Polynesians based their diets on seafood, fruit and taro; tribes in eastern Africa consumed sweet potatoes and whatever animals they could hunt or domesticate; Indians of the Andes ate potatoes, llamas, fish and kelp.

Dr. Price found that healthy people around the world didn’t consume any particular ratio of carbohydrates to protein to fats.  Carbohydrates dominated some ancestral diets and were nearly non-existent in others.  What Price did find was that all the ancestral diets were nutrient-dense and based on whole, unprocessed foods.

And not one of them looked anything like the USDA Food Pyramid.

In closing, Minger reminds the reader that while there’s no single diet that’s optimal for everyone, there are some common features of the ancestral diets that kept people healthy for generations:  nutrient-dense foods from both the plant and animal kingdoms, fat-soluble vitamins from foods like eggs and fish, and an absence of refined grains, sugars and vegetable oils.  And she offers a warning similar to one I offered myself in a recent post:  don’t label yourself and then stick to a particular diet regardless of the results for the sake of wearing the label:

If you choose to put a label on your diet, make sure it doesn’t undergo a sneaky “mission creep” into the realm of your self-identity.  Your current food choices may be low-carb, or low-fat, or plant-based, or any other number of descriptions – but you are not low-carb; you are not lowfat; you are not plant-based.  You’re a human being trying to make choices that best serve you and your specific goals at this point in time.  You are not identified by the foods you eat.  You are not a slave to an ideology.  Make your diet work for you; don’t work for you diet.

Wise words from such a young author.  I expect we’ll read many more wise words from Minger in the years to come.  In the meantime, this is an excellent book to add to your library.

But try to avoid banging your head on your desk while reading those chapters about the USDA.

Since many of you who have made the switch from Firefox to Pale Moon wanted to know if Mozilla's embrace of DRM meant that Pale Moon would follow suit, I shot the responsible party an email and received the following note:

"I've researched the topic and I believe it goes straight against what FOSS
stands for, so I will keep Pale Moon DRM-free."

It would be hard to describe the issue more succinctly than that. If you're still using Firefox and you don't support DRM, give Pale Moon a try.

This promises to be an interesting political battle, featuring Vibrant Americans vs Jewish women.

“If it’s not handled by… the start of next season, I don’t see how we’re playing basketball,” NBPA vice president Roger Mason Jr. said in an interview with Showtime’s Jim Rome. “We have player reps, we’ve got executive committee members…  Leaders of the teams, they’re all saying the same thing, ‘If [Sterling] is still in place, we ain’t playing’. … I was just in the locker room three or four days ago. LeBron and I talked about it. He ain’t playing if Sterling is still an owner.”

Mason clarified that the ultimatum applies equally to Shelly Sterling, too. “No Sterling deserves to be an owner of that franchise any longer,” Mason continued. “And I’ve gone down the line from LeBron to the other guys in the league that I’ve talked to and they all feel the same way. There’s no place for that family in the NBA.”

James, who scored 49 points in a Game 4 victory over the Nets in the Eastern conference semifinals on Monday, took a public stand against both Sterlings earlier this week.

“As players, we want what’s right and we don’t feel like no one in his family should be able to own the team,” he said, according to the Associated Press.

It's bad enough to argue that a man should be deprived of his property due to his private speech, but on the other hand, there are details related to Mr. Tokowitz's signature on various NBA documents that appear to considerably complicate the matter. But the former Miss Stein didn't do or say anything objectionable, so one wonders on what ground Mr. Mason and Mr. James could possibly argue that she should be deprived of her property.

I could not care less about the NBA, but this could provide some amusement. It should be interesting to see how fast the NBA reverses direction once Mrs. Tokowitz starts playing the sexist card and the media takes note of the fact that the league has no female owners.

USDA Orders Submachine Guns with 30 Round Magazines...


(First column, 6th story, link)

---

Patrick J. Michaels and Paul C. "Chip" Knappenberger

Global Science Report is a feature from the Center for the Study of Science, where we highlight one or two important new items in the scientific literature or the popular media. For broader and more technical perspectives, consult our monthly “Current Wisdom.”

—Award-winning climate modeler experiences “a situation that reminds me about the time of McCarthy”

An interesting juxtaposition of items appeared in our Inbox today.

First was an announcement that Dr. Lennart Bengtsson, former director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, had resigned from the Academic Advisory Council of the U.K.’s Global Warming Policy Foundation. What was surprising about this announcement was that it was just announced a week or so ago that Dr. Bengtsson—a prominent and leading climate modeler and research scientist—was joining the GWPF Council. At that time, there was some wondering aloud as to why Dr. Bengtsson would join an organization that was somewhat “skeptical” when it comes to the projections and impacts of climate change and the effectiveness and direction of climate change policy.

During one recent interview Dr. Bengtsson explained:

I think the climate community shall be more critical and spend more time to understand what they are doing instead of presenting endless and often superficial results and to do this with a critical mind. I do not believe that the IPCC machinery is what is best for science in the long term. We are still in a situation where our knowledge is insufficient and climate models are not good enough. What we need is more basic research freely organized and driven by leading scientists without time pressure to deliver and only deliver when they believe the result is good and solid enough. It is not for scientists to determine what society should do. In order for society to make sensible decisions in complex issues it is essential to have input from different areas and from different individuals. The whole concept behind IPCC is basically wrong.

A good summary of the buzz that surrounded Dr. Bengtsson and his association with GWPF is contained over at Judith Curry’s website, Climate Etc.

So why did Dr. Bengtsson suddenly resign? 

Here is the content of his resignation letter, written to GWPF Academic Advisory Council Chairman, Dr. David Henderson:

Dear Professor Henderson,

I have been put under such an enormous group pressure in recent days from all over the world that has become virtually unbearable to me. If this is going to continue I will be unable to conduct my normal work and will even start to worry about my health and safety. I see therefore no other way out therefore than resigning from GWPF. I had not expect[ed] such an enormous world-wide pressure put at me from a community that I have been close to all my active life. Colleagues are withdrawing their support, other colleagues are withdrawing from joint authorship etc.

I see no limit and end to what will happen. It is a situation that reminds me about the time of McCarthy. I would never have expect[ed] anything similar in such an original peaceful community as meteorology. Apparently it has been transformed in recent years.

[glad you noticed!—eds]

Under these [sic] situation I will be unable to contribute positively to the work of GWPF and consequently therefore I believe it is the best for me to reverse my decision to join its Board at the earliest possible time.

With my best regards

Lennart Bengtsson

This letter is stunning in its candor and shows that that all the conspiring and bullying that the was on full display in the Climategate email release continues unabashedly today. 

Aside from a bit of personal embarrassment from particularly bad behavior, by and large the climate science establishment just shrugged its shoulders at the Climategate revelations with a “Yeah, so what?”  That’s a fitting response as they seek to control the scientific discourse when it comes to climate change. Group pressure is an effective means of doing so.

What Climategate taught the bully cohort of scientists was they could continue to bully their colleagues, sabotage their publications, and intimidate journal editors with impunity.  As evidenced from Dr. Bengtsson’s resignation letter, if it has changed at all, the situation in climate science is worse now than it was before the emails were leaked.

Which leads to this email that we got today from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS):

Anyone thinking that there is an open flow of ideas in climate science is 100 percent wrong.

As a journalist, Michael J. Totten had to lie to get into Cuba, but he managed to do so, and was also able to travel outside Havana’s tourist sector to see how average Cubans “live” on the communist island. He writes about his recent trip to Cuba in City Journal (“The Last Communist City“), here’s an excerpt:

Outside its small tourist sector, the rest of Havana looks as though it suffered a catastrophe on the scale of Hurricane Katrina or the Indonesian tsunami. Roofs have collapsed. Walls are splitting apart. Window glass is missing. Paint has long vanished. It’s eerily dark at night, almost entirely free of automobile traffic. I walked for miles through an enormous swath of destruction without seeing a single tourist. Most foreigners don’t know that this other Havana exists, though it makes up most of the city—tourist buses avoid it, as do taxis arriving from the airport. It is filled with people struggling to eke out a life in the ruins.

As for the free health care, patients have to bring their own medicine, their own bedsheets, and even their own iodine to the hospital. Most of these items are available only on the illegal black market, moreover, and must be paid for in hard currency—and sometimes they’re not available at all. Cuba has sent so many doctors abroad—especially to Venezuela, in exchange for oil—that the island is now facing a personnel shortage. “I don’t want to say there are no doctors left,” says an American man who married a Cuban woman and has been back dozens of times, “but the island is now almost empty. I saw a banner once, hanging from somebody’s balcony, that said, DO I NEED TO GO TO VENEZUELA FOR MY HEADACHE?”

Housing is free, too, but so what? Americans can get houses in abandoned parts of Detroit for only $500—which makes them practically free—but no one wants to live in a crumbling house in a gone-to-the-weeds neighborhood. I saw adequate housing in the Cuban countryside, but almost everyone in Havana lives in a Detroit-style wreck, with caved-in roofs, peeling paint, and doors hanging on their hinges at odd angles.

Education is free, and the country is effectively 100 percent literate, thanks to Castro’s campaign to teach rural people to read shortly after he took power. But the regime has yet to make a persuasive argument that a totalitarian police state was required to get the literacy rate from 80 percent to 100 percent. After all, almost every other country in the Western Hemisphere managed the same feat at the same time, without the brutal repression.

Leftists often talk about “food deserts” in Western cities, where the poor supposedly lack options to buy affordable and nutritious food. If they want to see a real food desert, they should come to Havana. I went to a grocery store across the street from the exclusive Meliá Cohiba Hotel, where the lucky few with access to hard currency shop to supplement their meager state rations. The store was in what passes for a mall in Havana—a cluttered concrete box, shabby compared even with malls I’ve visited in Iraq. It carried rice, beans, frozen chicken, milk, bottled water, booze, a small bit of cheese, minuscule amounts of rancid-looking meat, some low-end cookies and chips from Brazil—and that’s it. No produce, cereal, no cans of soup, no pasta. A 7–11 has a far better selection, and this is a place for Cuba’s “rich” to shop. I heard, but cannot confirm, that potatoes would not be available anywhere in Cuba for another four months.

Related: See CD post “Communist markets in everything: Mattress repair in Cuba.”