Jts5665

(Don Boudreaux)

… is from page 268 of Armen Alchian’s profound 1976 essay “Problems of Rising Prices,” as it is reprinted in Vol. 1 of The Collected Works of Armen A. Alchian (2006) (original emphasis):

The so-called shortage of gasoline and energy in the United States [during the 1970s] was precisely and only such a political attack.  It could not have been brought about more cleverly and deceitfully even if the politically ambitious had explicitly written the script.  Inflate the money stock; when prices rise, impose price controls to correct the situation.  These controls lead to shortages which “require” government intervention to assure appropriate use of the limited supply and to allocate it and even to control and nationalize the production of energy.  The powers of political authorities are increased; the open society is suppressed.

Last night in Chicago I dined with Johan Norberg.  (By the way, if you’ve not yet read Johan’s book In Defense of Global Capitalism, do so.  It’s a masterpiece.)

Johan and I were discussing our introductions to classical liberalism.  My own introduction came in January 1977 when I first saw supply-and-demand analysis in a Principles of Microeconomics course at my alma mater, Nicholls State University.  My professor – Michelle Francois – explained the consequences of government-imposed price ceilings.  Shortages.  Queuing.  Arbitrary and grossly unfair rationing.  Higher costs to consumers of acquiring the goods and services whose money prices are capped by government diktat.  Increased demands for further government intervention.

The Nixonian price controls of the 1970s were not good for much, but they did reveal to those of us who suffered through them the truths of economics much more vividly than those truths might otherwise have been revealed.

How can you tell if an introduced bill is a bad piece of legislation? Well, there are several indicators to look for -- overly broad language, written as a reaction to a recent tragedy -- but when a bill is referred to as the "retaliation bill" by a large majority of the press, the problems are right there on the surface. (h/t to Techdirt reader Rekrul)

The Kansas legislature's Committee on Corrections and Juvenile Justice recently introduced a bill with some very chilling implications for citizens.

The bill, titled "filing false complaints against a law enforcement officer," was introduced in February by the Committee on Corrections and Juvenile Justice and moved quickly to the Taxation Committee before ending March 13 in the Committee for Transportation and Public Safety Budget. In its one-hour Tuesday hearing, according to the legislative research department, only one person spoke in favor of the bill while eight others, including legislators and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, spoke against it…

According to the bill, a complaint over a law enforcement officer that a department finds to be false "shall be closed immediately and the law enforcement agency shall seek criminal prosecution against the complaint for perjury." All complaints would be submitted with a signed affidavit that included the time, date, place and nature of the offense. Current law requires that law enforcement departments review all complaints, whether anonymous or signed.

This bill, currently stalled, would make it a felony to file a false complaint against a police officer, something that used to be handled via civil litigation. And there would be no option for filing anonymous complaints, which would further discourage the reporting of alleged police misconduct.

In addition, officers would be allowed to view the complaint and any related evidence before making a statement, giving accused officers a chance to craft narratives before issuing statements that might be contradicted by the evidence submitted. The complaint's lack of anonymity would give accused officers the name, address, phone number, etc. of their accuser, something that could easily lead to harassment. (Of course, law enforcement agencies could strip this information before presenting it to the accused officer [the bill contains no stipulation to do so], but how many here believe that would actually happen -- or that the information couldn't be accessed otherwise?)

Also problematic is the fact that the bill stipulates that "no other law enforcement agency" can open an investigation on a complaint if another agency has performed an investigation and found no evidence of wrongdoing. This would keep all investigations "in-house," which greatly contributes to the likelihood that complaints will be found false (and subsequently, result in felony charges against the filer). This would prevent agencies like the FBI and DOJ from investigating closed complaints to see if anything was missed or covered up. This stipulation would further insulate police from accountability.

The bill is so bad even the attorney for the local police union (the entity that usually works hard to restore bad cops to their former positions) found the wording somewhat problematic.

The one person who testified in favor of the bill Tuesday was Sean McCauley, an attorney for the Kansas chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police and the Kansas State Troopers Association. While he had reservations about allowing departments to pursue charges for unfounded or minor allegations, local FOP President Sgt. Tyson Meyers did see some value in the bill.

"I'd like to protect officers against false allegations," he said, stating officers can be subject to administrative leave following a complaint or suffer from a tarnished reputation even if the allegation is proved to be false.

"At the same time, we should police our own and have the integrity to monitor our department."

He also added that it was a bad idea to limit complaint investigations to one department, noting that previous investigations by outside agencies had led to the rooting out of bad cops who otherwise would have gone unpunished.

As it stands now, the bill is effectively dead. The coverage of the bill has been universally negative, and after its nearly one-sided showing during its floor appearance, no further discussions on the bill have been scheduled. The question remains as to why such a bill, loaded with negative side effects for the public, was ever introduced, as well as who exactly is behind it. The committee page lists several names, but the bill's sponsor is the committee itself, rather than a certain legislator. Safety in numbers applies to bad legislation, it seems. The bill seeks to out anonymous complainants, but has been shepherded into the public forum by no one in particular.

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In 2007, the IPCC predicted that rising global temperatures would kill off many species. But in its new report, part of which will be presented next Monday, the UN climate change body backtracks. There is a shortage of evidence, a … Continue reading →

The Obama administration has been helping to facilitate a series of events nationwide at Mexican Consulate offices to enroll people in Obamacare – and a key activist says the efforts are “our responsibility” regardless of citizenship.

“Whether they’re Mexican nationals or whether they’re United States citizens or whether they’re in transition-- and if they’re there it is our responsibility within all of America to educate on the Affordable Care Act,” Enroll America Field Organizer Jose Medrano told Breitbart News on Wednesday.

Health Care insurance navigator groups hosted an Obamacare enrollment fair on Tuesday in the Mexican Consulate’s Brownsville office, The Rio Grande Guardian reported last Friday, where Mexican nationals among others were counseled about enrolling in the ACA.

“The Mexican consulate is a very reliable source of information to the Latino community. And therefore when they host their events, yesterday being the health fair, there are several hundred people that show up,” Medrano said.

Under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), undocumented immigrants aren't supposed to be receiving government-run health benefits or subsidized coverage. However, President Barack Obama told Latinos in early March that the Healthcare.gov website would not be used to find out about an individual’s immigration status.

“None of the information that is provided in order for you to obtain health insurance is in any way transferred to immigration services,” he said.

According to Medrano, 101 families were represented at the ACA enrollment and education fair at the Brownsville Mexican Consulate on Tuesday and about 60 percent of them spoke to a health care counselor. Medrano says that the consulate’s office is helpful “as part of the transition” to “mainstream… America.”

This is not the first time the Mexican Consulate has been used to enroll individuals into Obamacare. Get Covered Illinois announced in late February that the Erie Family Health Center hoped to increase its enrollment numbers at the Mexican Consulate in Chicago, The Sun Times reported.

According to Vegas Seven, in Nevada, the Latino community is being targeted for ACA enrollment at the Mexican Consulate in downtown Las Vegas. Insurance News says Hispanic National Advocacy groups like National Alliance for Hispanic Health have helped lead the push to get more Latinos enrolled in Obamacare.

“Promoting Obamacare at a Mexican consulate raises three major policy concerns,” Stephen Miller, a spokesman for top immigration hawk Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) told Breitbart News.

“One, the possibility that illegal immigrants could fraudulently access federal subsidies; two, that such promotions provide a financial inducement to unlawfully enter the U.S. (or overstay a visa) by offering households headed by illegal immigrants federal subsidies through their legal relatives or dependents; and three, that these activities widen an existing flaw in our legal admissions process by continuing to subvert the principle that those seeking to lawfully enter the US should be financially self-sufficient,” Miller said.

Mexican Consulates have been used previously to advance USDA assistance programs like food stamps to Mexican nationals, The Daily Caller reported in July of 2012. Mexico promoted the program to 50 of its consular offices in the U.S.

In 2012, ranking members of the Senate Budget, Finance, Judiciary, and Agriculture Committees wrote an oversight letter to Secretaries Napolitano and Clinton that said in part:

The [Immigration and Nationality Act] specifically states: ‘An alien who… is likely at any time to become a public charge is inadmissible.’ … We were thus shocked to discover that both the State Department and DHS exclude reliance on almost all governmental welfare programs when evaluating whether an alien is likely to become a public charge… Under your interpretation, an able-bodied immigrant of working age could receive the bulk of his or her income in the form of federal welfare and still not be deemed a ‘public charge.’”

Medrano, however, said the Mexican Consulate is a trusted source of information for Latinos, who use “those who they relied on for good information” in the past.

“So many of these, of course, while they are U.S. citizens have very strong ties to the consulate in terms of news and information and events and things like that,” he said.

He added, “And also, it was a health fair. The Mexican consulate was providing a community health fair and as part of that, they asked us to come in, because that was the tie in.”

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has been taking time out of her schedule to push for more ACA enrollment within the Lone Star state. She has made at least four visits to Texas for ACA outreach and enrollment and education related events since December 20, 2013.

"I’m sure [she was aware],” Medrano said when asked if Sebelius knew about the event at the Mexican Consulate. “We put our events in a database that several organizations are connected to at mainly HHS, so they are fully aware of who was here.”

Medrano says that Sebelius has not visited South Texas yet but Obama Small Business Administrator Yolanda Garcia Olivarez did make an appearance at the consulate during the fair and “met with the consul so it was an event that was driven by that presence as well." Olivarez also made a visit that day to the Brownsville Chamber of Commerce to promote SBA programs.

Olivares told Brownsville’s Action 4 News, "If they don’t meet the deadline they've lost the opportunity to have and to have coverage of affordable health care."

The fair was one of two events (the other was at the McAllen Convention Center) where ACA navigators are scouring the Rio Grande Valley to enroll Latino individuals into the government health care program.

Venezuela Says Subliminal Crosswords Stoking Violent Protests...


(Second column, 25th story, link)

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Navigators Enrolling People at Mexican Consulates...


(First column, 9th story, link)

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Related stories:

'GODFATHER': I had 'contrary' views on Obamacare...
Hospitals Plot End of Insurance Companies...

Live a clean life and the cops should leave you alone, right? RIGHT?!? Harvey Silverglate wasn't being facetious when he wrote "Three Felonies A Day." There are all sorts of laws waiting to be broken, laws that boggle the mind in their insipidity.

As we covered recently, the FBI arrested one of its own handcrafted "terrorists" for "conspiring" to materially aid a terrorist organization. This "conspiring" apparently took the form of the suspect talking about possibly joining a terrorist group and, with undercover agents' urging, traveling to Canada to fill out some sort of terrorist job application. He was arrested at the border, having really done nothing more than talk big and wear the "rube" label really well.

More recently, Techdirt covered Judge Otis Wright's beration of the ATF for setting up stooges to pull off a fake crime -- a conspiracy to rob a "stash house." Of course, the stash house didn't exist, but this didn't stop the government from bringing criminal charges against the "criminals" and seeking sentences based on the entirely fictional contents of the fictional house. The ATF told its stooges that the house contained 20-25 kilos of coke in the house. Judge Wright asked why not just say 10, or 100 or 1,000, as long as the government's just making up numbers? No crime here because said "stash house" simply didn't exist and yet, people were arrested and put on trial.

Here's another case of no criminal activity somehow turning into a crime in the hands of zealous law enforcement officers who apparently couldn't handle not getting the drug bust they were obviously seeking. (via Reason)

Deputies said they stopped Delbert Dewayne Galbreath at NW 10th Street and Interstate 44 for a broken brake light. The deputy said Galbreath admitted he did not have a license to drive. Two deputies asked to search his car and he agreed.

A deputy found a cigarette pouch that had 16 pieces of a rock-like form, which authorities generally associate as crack cocaine. The deputies said they also found a digital scale.

Authorities tested the rocks and said they did not contain cocaine. When they asked Galbreath what the rocks were, he said they were Scentsy.
Galbreath was arrested on suspicion of possession with intent to distribute imitation controlled dangerous substance (CDS), possession of drug paraphernalia, driving under a revoked license and defective equipment.

Read that again: a man was arrested for not possessing drugs. Note the oddly specific denial. The man said they were "Scentsy." This doesn't sound like someone just blurting out the first thing that came to mind when deputies searched his vehicle.

If you're not familiar with Scentsy, it's a direct marketing company that specializes in "wickless candles," which are scented wax cubes that are warmed on its proprietary warmers. (All images taken from Scentsy's catalog unless otherwise noted)

Here's how the process works.


Here's a shot of a couple of Scentsy cubes sitting in a warmer with a vaguely scale-like shape.


Here's some more scale-esque warmers Scentsy offers.


And here's another scale-like warmer that's included in every Scentsy starter kit.


And here's some vaguely crack-colored wax sitting in a Scentsy warmer.


And for comparison's sake, here's a DEA file photo of crack cocaine.


So, this seems like an entirely plausible explanation. The plausibility factor shoots way up when you factor in the negative test results. But rather than investigate whether Galbreath's claims were accurate after the "NOT COCAINE" determination, the deputies ran with their original plan: nail Galbreath for drug dealing. Instead of dealing drugs, Galbreath was trying to sell fake drugs, which is completely indistinguishable from actual criminal activity when you're sitting in a jail cell.

Maybe the Sheriff's Dept. is hoping to sweat out some more info from the jailed "dealer," like who his pissed off customers are or who's further up the chain supplying him with fake drugs and taking a percentage of each sale he makes. (My hunch? A regional director in Oklahoma as well as any number of intermediaries along the direct marketing food chain.)

"Don't do the crime if you can't do the time," they say. But they somehow fail to add, "Don't NOT do the crime if you can't do the time," because everyday citizens like you and me might find that statement baffling, horrifying and complete bullshit.

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There must be something about Yelp reviews that make people act all crazy-like. Maybe it's the personal nature behind someone reviewing your goods or services, or perhaps there's something about seeing a review online in text that drives people off the deep end, but the number of legal threats and lawsuits connected to simple Yelp reviews always surprises me. Specifically, I'd have thought we've had enough of these stories by now that competent businesses would realize that issuing threats over reviews is a great way to get the Streisand reputation multiplier going.

But, apparently not. This latest example is of a watch repair shop issuing a legal threat over what I have to say is a relatively innocuous review of their business. The most scathing section appears to me to be this.

This is where Ron really lost points. I took both watches to a place called Precision Watch Repair, right around the corner, which had good ratings here on Yelp. I met with Eric, who told me first that he definitely could fix the vintage one, and also that he could repair the Ebel without sending it out - all for a good price. The Ebel was repaired in a day. I went from hopeless to happy within a span of 15 minutes. In addition, Eric called me THAT DAY with the estimate, and followed up the next day. So Ron Gordon loses in terms of creativity, and just overall slowness....which seems appropriate for a review of a watch repair shop.

No big deal, right? The review is on point, relevant to the business, and omits any real inflammatory language. Even if it turned out the claims in the review were exaggerated, we're not exactly talking about a vilification here. Well, the watch repair shop isn't taking all this mild complaining lying down, damn it.

Well, okay then. Call me crazy, but it seems to me that the claim that this one mild review was detrimental to Ron Gordon's business is probably more melodramatic than a high school freshman that just got stood up to the spring formal. This story going viral on the other hand? Yeah, that Streisand Effect is probably doing some actual harm to the business and its reputation for treating their customers well. Actually moving forward with any defamation lawsuit would be particularly tricky as well, given they'd have to prove the falsehood of the claim. Meanwhile, a whole lot more people know the name Ron Gordon Watch Repair than they did yesterday, and for all the wrong reasons.

As the original article notes, however, perhaps we shouldn't be surprised if Ron is getting bad legal advice, judging by the Yelp reviews for his lawyer.

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A while back I wrote about my concerns about the total absence of any security at all in the Arizona corporate annual reporting system

I started the annual reporting process by just typing in the name of my company and getting started.  There was no password protection, no identity check.  They had no way of knowing I had anything to do with this corporation and yet I was answering questions like "have you been convicted for fraud."  The potential for mischief is enormous.  One would have to get the timing right (an annual report must be due before one can get in) but one could easily open the site on January 1 and start entering false information in the registrations for such corporations as Exxon and Wal-Mart.

See for yourself.  Here is their web site.

I showed how one could open and file the report for a company like Wal-Mart, changing all their officers names, and confessing to all sorts of imagined corporate crimes

Again, note what I am saying.  This is not the result of hacking.  This is not lax security I figured out how to evade.  This is the result of no security whatsoever.  I simply went to the link above, clicked on the Wal-Mart Associates link, and then clicked on the annual report link.  I know from doing my own registration that there is a signature page at the end, but all you do is type in the name of an officer and a title -- data that is right there on the site.  It's like asking you for a password after the site just listed all the valid passwords.

The head of the Arizona Corporation Commission wrote me back. Here is here email in its entirety:

Dear Mr. Meyer:

Thank you for your email regarding the Corporations Division.  The Arizona Corporation Commission is the repository for all business formation documents for corporations and limited liability corporations.  We are in full compliance with state statutes.

Submitting false documents to alter another’s corporate structure or status is a crime and carries a Class 4 or Class 5 penalty.  The Commission or the aggrieved business entity may refer the false filing to the Attorney General’s office for prosecution.  Additionally, the individual business entity may pursue a civil cause of action.  The Commission only accepts on-line charges for a few services such as name reservation or to order a certificate of good standing, and the online payment process is completely secure.

Even though the Commission’s existing security measures comply with the state law and are similar to most other states and other Arizona governmental entities like the County Treasurer’s Office, the Commission is looking at implementing new technology to allow for the online submission of additional services – such as the filing of original Articles of Organization and Articles of Incorporation.  We do intend to provide password protected security features when that new technology is offered to the public.

J. Jerich

Executive Director

Arizona Corporation Commission

I had no doubt that submitting a false annual report for Wal-Mart would be illegal.  Duh.  However, it is just incredibly naive that this is the sole extent of the Commission's security, to prosecute people once the damage is done.  Can you imagine if Amazon had the same security policy - "we are getting rid of passwords because it would be illegal for you to buy something from someone else's account."  I wonder if the commissioners leave their doors unlocked at night, trusting in the threat of future prosecution to deter burglary and mayhem in their homes?

Constitutional Sheriffs and Police Officers Association (CSPOA) president Richard Mack is calling on Vermont Sheriffs to refuse to enforce new gun control measures passed earlier in the month.

The new measures ban the carrying of concealed handguns in bars and restaurants, "[require] gun owners to keep guns locked up at home, [and authorize] police to confiscate guns during domestic disputes."

According to Fox News, CSPOA president Mack said:

It's astonishing that people are so cavalier about violating the Second Amendment. Burlington City Council sounds like they are just following the trend to do things that are unconstitutional and go around sheriffs, and go around the laws, or subvert the laws, or disobey the laws. 

Mack added: "We're seeing sheriffs in New York oppose the SAFE Act and Gov. Cuomo. If we have sheriffs in New York doing this, how much more should we have sheriffs doing it in Vermont?"

Follow AWR Hawkins on Twitter @AWRHawkins  Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com 

Walter Olson

…and the U.S. Department of Justice emerges whistling with $1.2 billion. I explain how it happened in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece today (more: Overlawyered). Toyota’s cars are very safe indeed, and “sudden acceleration” was a concoction of media-fueled panic, as the government’s own safety engineers have confirmed. But now the company is being punished not just for alleged data-reporting and compliance infractions unlikely to have caused any genuine material risk to the public, but also for defending itself and its products at Congressional hearings and in the arena of public opinion. DoJ’s demagogic press release cites, among the instances of supposed fraud for which Toyota is now being punished by the gigantic forfeiture, such standard exercises in bland crisis communication as, “The safety of our owners and the public is our utmost concern and Toyota has and will continue to thoroughly investigate and take appropriate measures to address any defect trends that are identified.” 

A couple of other points I didn’t have room for in the WSJ piece: Toyota is settling the government’s trumped-up single charge of mail fraud by way of a so-called Deferred Prosecution Agreement, or DPA, and its terms really must be seen to be believed. “Toyota understands and agrees that the exercise of the Office’s discretion under this Agreement is unreviewable by any court,” appears on clause 14 on page 6, with “Office” referring to the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, currently Preet Bharara. And if you are expecting even the tiniest squeak from anyone at Toyota in contradiction to the government line, even around the coffee machine at the local dealership, consider clause 13, which states: that Toyota “agrees that it shall not, through its attorneys, agents, or employees, make any statement, in litigation or otherwise, contradicting the Statement of Facts or its representations in this Agreement.” If DoJ catches wind of any such statement it can revoke the agreement not to prosecute, without of course having to give back the billion dollars. “The decision as to whether any such contradictory statement shall be imputed to Toyota for the purpose of determining whether Toyota has violated this agreement shall be within the sole discretion of the Office.” 

When people talk about federal prosecutors having become a law unto themselves, this is the sort of thing they mean.

Preface:  The scientific method requires allowing a free-for-all of hypotheses, which then rise or fall based upon the results of actual experiments.  In other words, science means that you throw out theories - no matter how good they look on paper - that are disproven by experimental results, and adopt those confirmed by the results. [Economics is supposed to do that, too ... but hasn't.]

For example, imprisoning Galileo for life because he didn't agree with the "accepted" consensus that the Sun revolved around the Earth was not a great example of the scientific method. Instead of conducting experiments to see whether the Earth or Sun were the center of the Solar System, those with the prevailing view simply silenced the dissenter.

Anyone who has studied the history of science knows that many theories that were universally accepted and “known” to be true turned out to be false.   See these examples from the Houston Chronicle and the Guardian.

 

Noam Chomsky said years ago that he would submit to fascism if it would help combat global warming:

Suppose it was discovered tomorrow that the greenhouse effects has been way understimated, and that the catastrophic effects are actually going to set in 10 years from now, and not 100 years from now or something. Well, given the state of the popular movements we have today, we’d probably have a fascist takeover-with everybody agreeing to it, because that would be the only method for survival that anyone could think of. I’d even agree to it, because there’s just no other alternatives right now.”

In 2006, Grist called for Nuremberg-style trials for climate skeptics.  (The article was later retracted.)

Environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. lashed out at global warming skeptics in 2007, declaring “This is treason. And we need to start treating them as traitors.”

In 2007, a UN official – Yvo de Boer – warned that ignoring warming would be ‘criminally irresponsible’ Excerpt: The U.N.’s top climate official warned policymakers and scientists trying to hammer out a landmark report on climate change that ignoring the urgency of global warming would be “criminally irresponsible.”

The same year, another UN official – UN special climate envoy Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland – said “it’s completely immoral, even, to question” the UN’s scientific consensus on climate.

In 2008, prominent Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki called for government leaders skeptical of global warming to be “thrown into jail.”

The same year, British journalism professor Alex Lockwood said that writers questioning global warming should be banned.

In 2009, a writer at Talking Points Memo advocated that global warming “deniers” be executed or jailed. (He later retracted the threat.)

James Lovelock – environmentalist and creator of the “Gaia hypothesis” – told the Guardian in 2010:

We need a more authoritative world. We’ve become a sort of cheeky, egalitarian world where everyone can have their say. It’s all very well, but there are certain circumstances – a war is a typical example – where you can’t do that. You’ve got to have a few people with authority who you trust who are running it. And they should be very accountable too, of course.

 

But it can’t happen in a modern democracy. This is one of the problems. What’s the alternative to democracy? There isn’t one. But even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.

Earlier this month, an assistant philosophy professor at Rochester Institute of Technology said he wants to send people who disagree with him about global warming to jail.

And there are many other examples of threats made in regard to the climate debate.

Postscript:  If we can’t have free speech and an open scientific debate, then we are no longer living in a democracy or a society which follows the scientific method. Threatening scientific debate is anti-science and anti-liberty.

It is especially troubling given the background of climate discussions.  Specifically, in the 1970s, many American scientists were terrified of an imminent ice age.   Obama’s top science advisor – John Holdren – was one of them.  Holdren and some other scientists proposed pouring soot over the arctic to melt the ice cap and so prevent the dreaded ice age.   Holdren warned of dire consequences – including starvation and the largest tidal wave in history – if mankind did not rally on an emergency basis to stop the coming ice age.

Were those who questioned the likelihood of an imminent ice age also threatened with death or imprisonment?

Moreover, it is also concerning that many of the “solutions” proposed to combat a changing climate could do more harm than good (and see this).    That’s sort of like invading Iraq after 9/11 because we had to “do” something…

Let’s say that – hypothetically – 100% of all climate scientists reached a consensus that manmade global warming from carbon dioxide was an imminent threat.   Shouldn’t we choose approaches that actually work – and which do more good than harm (more) – instead of messing things up even further?

On March 14th, Breitbart News reported on how Lisa Atkin pulled a handgun on a burglar in her home and pinned him down until police arrived 23 minutes later.

The burglar, Joseph Baker, broke through two doors to get inside Atkin's Junction City, Oregon, home at approximately 9 a.m. on March 12th.

Breitbart News recently talked to Atkin about that morning, asking about her experience with firearms and how it came about that she was ready to defend her life and property when the burglar appeared.

Atkins told us she is originally from the UK, so she did not grow up around guns and was not even exposed to one for the first 37 years of her life. Then she moved to the United States in 2005 and realized a gun "is an inanimate object, relying on its operator as to whether it is put to good or bad use."

Said Atkin, "My training originally consisted of my husband (who is a US citizen by birth) taking me out shooting, simply to allow me the experience. He has been shooting and hunting for over 40 years and has extensive personal experience."

With her husband she shot and familiarized herself with a .30-06 rifle, .22 rifle, Ruger .357 revolver, Kahr PM40, and a .22 pistol. She then enrolled in Oregon Firearms Academy for range time and concealed carry courses.

Atkin said: 

Women are often the target of violent crimes because they are generally more easy to overpower. So criminals have an advantage through pure strength or through the misuse of weapons. Firearms allow women to introduce an equalizer into the situation, [and carrying one] clearly shows that a woman refuses to be a victim, and will instead stand firm as a survivor.

She said her advice to women everywhere is, "We have our Constitution and Second Amendment rights for a reason... and every woman should care about exercising [her] Second Amendment rights."

Atkin concluded by saying, "Be a survivor, not a victim."

Follow AWR Hawkins on Twitter @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.

David Boaz

The Washington Post reports today that it’s “harder to describe” the mission of one of the magnet schools in Arlington County, Virginia: Arlington Traditional School. Not that hard, if you just read the quotes from the principal and parents:

“Our emphasis is on basic education,” Principal Holly Hawthorne said….

“The word ‘traditional’ implies a cachet to us,” said Craig Montesano, a lobbyist for the shipping industry who visited Arlington Traditional with his wife. To him, the word conjures ancient Rome and Greece and the promise that his daughter will be “grounded in the learning that has come down through the ages in Western civilization.”

Some parents say the selective nature and more disciplined culture remind them of private school. 

And it seems to work:

The federal government has twice named Arlington Traditional a National Blue Ribbon School for its academic performance. And its students routinely outscore district averages on the Standards of Learning tests.

And parents like it:

Last spring, 298 families applied for 72 slots.

So why doesn’t the Arlington County School Board expand it, or build more such schools around the county to accommodate all the parents who want their children to get this exotic thing called “traditional” or “back to basics” education? Maybe they just didn’t realize until today – or last spring – how popular it is? Well, as it happens, I live in Arlington, and I recall that the Washington Post has been reporting on the popularity of Arlington Traditional School since the late 1970s. Parents used to camp out overnight to get their children into the school until they created a lottery system. Through the Nexis service, I found some of the stories I recalled. Most of these articles are not online. 

Here’s what the Post reported in September 1982 when the school, then called Page Traditional School, was three years old: 

For Arlington school board member Margaret A. Bocek and her husband, the first day of school this year began late Monday night when they and 40 other parents camped out on the lawn of the county’s Page Traditional School to ensure that their 3-year-old children could attend there on opening day, 1984…. 

In the last three years, such parent stakeouts have become commonplace at Page, a public alternative school that stresses a traditional format of self-contained classrooms, regular homework and strict standards for behavior and appearance. Page parents have been lobbying recently for expanding the program to the eighth grade and for expansion of the school’s program to other schools.

And here’s a report from September 1985:

This year, the line began to form at 10 a.m. on Labor Day, 23 hours before Page Traditional School in Arlington would begin accepting applications for the kindergarten class of 1987.

By the time Principal Frank Miller arrived at 9 a.m. the next day, about 80 parents were waiting on the lawn – more than triple the 25 slots that would be available in the school’s one kindergarten class.

Seven years after its much-heralded establishment as a back-to-basics, structured alternative to the open-classroom schools popular in the mid-1970s, Page is a cause of both enthusiasm and consternation in Arlington.

Each September, eager parents camp out on the lawn at 1501 N. Lincoln St. to put the names of their 3-year-olds on the kindergarten waiting list.

December 1991:

In an effort to stop overnight campouts by parents eager to register their children at Arlington’s three popular alternative schools, county school officials have proposed dropping the first-come, first-served admissions policy in favor of a random drawing.

An October 1999 headline:

School’s Excellence Is in Demand

Now you’ll notice that the 1991 story mentions three “popular alternative schools,” and indeed the other two, Drew Elementary and H-B Woodlawn Secondary, offer a very different alternative, a more informal, individualized style of education reflecting the “alternative” ideas of the 1960s and 1970s. The Post referred in 2004 to Woodlawn’s “quirky, counterculture ways.” In November 1991 the Post reported that “Last weekend, dozens of parents camped in front of H-B Woodlawn to register their children for the 70 sixth-grade slots.”

In 2012 the Arlington school board did vote to expand Arlington Traditional School by 12 classrooms. But why did it take so long? And why not open more “back to basics” schools, and also more “counterculture” schools, if that’s what parents want?

I wrote about that years ago in a book I edited, Liberating Schools: Education in the Inner City.   

In the marketplace, competition keeps businesses on their toes.  They get constant feedback from satisfied and dissatisfied customers. Firms that serve customers well prosper and expand. Firms that don’t respond to the message they get from customers go out of business. Like all government institutions, the public schools lack that feedback and those incentives.

No principal or teacher will get a raise for attracting more students to his or her school. A successful manager in a private business gets a raise, or gets hired away for a bigger salary. A successful entrepreneur expands his or her store or opens a branch. Can one imagine a public school choice system allowing a successful principal to open another school across town and run both of them? 

If Virginia were even a little bit tolerant of charter schools, or if Virginia allowed real private school choice, parent groups or entrepreneurs could organize to deliver the kinds of schools – from traditional to counterculture – that families want. But in a bureaucratic monopoly, the local paper can run thirty years of stories about parents desperate to get their children into particular types of schools, and the central planners can ignore them. 

Here you go, direct from Baen:  http://www.baenebooks.com/p-2385-monster-hunter-nemesis-earc.aspx

The book will actually release in July. For those of you not familiar with how eARCs work, they are Electronic Advanced Reader Copies. Meaning that they are the things that go out to reviewers and buyers. They aren’t fully edited yet. This is the book as it stands when I turn my draft in to the publisher before there is any copy editing.

So if you are truly hard core, you can get the book several months early, and as an added bonus see all my typos. :)

As I’m sure many of you know, a large new study concluded that saturated fat doesn’t cause heart disease.  Here’s a quote from one of the many media articles about the study:

Many of us have long been told that saturated fat, the type found in meat, butter and cheese, causes heart disease. But a large and exhaustive new analysis by a team of international scientists found no evidence that eating saturated fat increased heart attacks and other cardiac events.

For decades, health officials have urged the public to avoid saturated fat as much as possible, saying it should be replaced with the unsaturated fats in foods like nuts, fish, seeds and vegetable oils.

But the new research, published on Monday in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, did not find that people who ate higher levels of saturated fat had more heart disease than those who ate less. Nor did it find less disease in those eating higher amounts of unsaturated fat, including monounsaturated fat like olive oil or polyunsaturated fat like corn oil.

This ought to drive a stake through the heart of the Lipid Hypothesis, but it won’t.  Here’s part of a blog post by Dr. Malcolm Kendrick, offering his prediction:

You see, the entire edifice of the cholesterol hypothesis is held together by two links in a chain. Link one is that saturated fat consumption raises cholesterol levels. Link two is that raised cholesterol levels then cause heart disease.

This is the cholesterol hypothesis, or the lipid hypothesis, and it has driven medical thinking for the last sixty years.

I have had it painstakingly explained to me, by very clever people, exactly how saturated fat raises cholesterol levels. Indeed, you will find ‘evidence’ for this almost universally accepted fact in literally thousands of clinical studies.

Okay, let us accept that eating saturated fat does raise cholesterol levels. However, if consumption of saturated fat does not increase the rate of heart disease then …. Then raised cholesterol levels can have nothing whatsoever to do with causing heart disease. Just keep chasing the implications of that statement around in your head for a while.

So what happens now? We now have a cholesterol/lipid hypothesis that just had its head blown off. Yet, it still continues to wander about, unaware that it is actually dead… I suspect it will continue to rampage about, stomping on puny humans for many years, before it finally keels over and admits that it is dead.

The cholesterol hypothesis is not only blissfully unaware of its demise, its proponents are pushing harder than ever to beat down everyone’s cholesterol levels.  Take a look at the latest news on guidelines for prescribing statins:

The new American College of Cardiology (ACC) and American Heart Association (AHA) guidelines for the treatment of cholesterol would increase the number of individuals eligible for statin therapy by nearly 13 million people, an increase that is largely driven by older patients and treating individuals without cardiovascular disease, according to a new analysis.

Awesome.  So we’d be giving statins to more older people (the group least likely to benefit from statins) and people who don’t have heart disease (the other group least likely to benefit from statins).  Makes perfect sense.  I don’t have cancer, but I’m considering signing up for chemotherapy just in case.

Among older adults, those aged 60 to 75 years old, 87.4% of men would now be eligible for the lipid-lowering medication, which is up from one-third under the old Adult Treatment Panel (ATP) III guidelines. For women of the same age, the percentage of those now eligible for statins would increase from 21.2% under ATP III to 53.6% with the new 2013 clinical guidelines.

Headline from the future:  Doctors baffled by sharp rise in Alzheimer’s, arthritis among elderly.

The increase, say investigators, is the result of more patients being eligible based on their 10-year risk of cardiovascular disease.

Yeah, that must be it.  It couldn’t be the result of a desire to sell more statins.

The new guidelines identify four groups of primary- and secondary-prevention patients for physicians to focus their efforts to reduce cardiovascular disease events. And in these four patient groups, the new guidelines make recommendations regarding the appropriate “intensity” of statin therapy in achieving relative reductions in LDL cholesterol.

These four groups include individuals with clinical atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, individuals with LDL-cholesterol levels >190 mg/dL, diabetic patients without cardiovascular disease aged 40 to 75 years old with LDL-cholesterol levels between 70 and 189 mg/dL, and those without evidence of cardiovascular disease, an LDL cholesterol level 70–189 mg/dL, and a 10-year risk of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease >7.5%.

In other words, resistance is futile.  Almost everyone needs to take statins at some point.  Go get yours before the Christmas rush.

Let’s suppose that statins do prevent heart attacks in some people … say, middle-aged men already known to have heart disease.  Does that make statins the best possible treatment?  I hardly think so.  Take a look of part of an article reporting on a comparison of statins vs. fish oil:

A clinical trial reported in the Archives of Internal Medicine compared people who took statin drugs with those who just took fish oil capsules.  Both these groups were compared to a control group that took a placebo.  The statin group decreased mortality by 10% over the placebo group; however, the fish oil group decreased mortality by 23% over the placebo group.  In other words, the participants who took the fish oil capsules had over twice the health benefit of those who took the statin drugs.

Hmmm, statins or fish oil … tough choice.  Statins cause muscle pain, joint pain, mitochondrial damage, liver damage and cognitive impairment.  By contrast, here’s what WebMD has to say about omega-3 fatty acids, the type of fats found in fish oil:

Hundreds of studies suggest that omega-3s may provide some benefits to a wide range of diseases: cancer, asthma, depression, cardiovascular disease, ADHD, and autoimmune diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis.

And I’m guessing fish oil probably won’t turn you stupid and make your joints hurt.  The trouble is, nobody’s going to rake in $30 billion per year from fish-oil tablets or wild-caught salmon.  As far as I know, you can’t patent a fish — although it wouldn’t surprise me to learn Monsanto has tried patenting a laboratory salmon that can’t reproduce.

The cholesterol hypothesis has indeed had its head blown off, but I agree with Dr. Kendrick:  it will continue to stomp us tiny humans for years, or at least until nobody’s making a hefty profit selling cholesterol-lowering drugs.

Last week, lots of attention was paid to New Jersey's idiotic and corrupt decision to block Tesla from operating its own stores there, because car dealers don't like the competition and hate the idea of car manufacturers selling direct. As we noted, any such move is a pretty clear sign of corruption at the state level, favoring political allies over the public. There are similar issues at the city level, and this week's corruption highlight award goes to Seattle, where the city council has massively limited ridesharing/app-based transportation services like Uber, Lyft and Sidecar. The law doesn't ban them outright, but makes them a lot less useful for consumers (and drivers) by saying each can only have 150 cars on the road at any time -- which is a hell of a lot less than the combined 3,000 they had.

There's simply no reason for this, other than to protect the legacy taxi providers. If consumers want those app-based services, why are they being blocked? And, of course, because so few cars will be available, those services become a lot less desirable (less likely to have a car available nearby, etc.). The end result is that it sucks for everyone. People wanting to get places will have fewer options. People who might want to earn money as a driver cannot. These new innovative companies are held back. The only "winners" are the current taxi owners who have less competition.

One council member, Tom Rasmussen pointed out the absurdity of this, and offered up an amendment (which was voted down) that said there shouldn't be any caps on drivers from such services:

"Let's listen to what the public is saying," he said. "Let's not cut supply when demand is so high."

The public? The public? Ha! They're not lobbying like the taxi and limo companies.

As another council member, Tim Burgess notes:

"Someone told me that trying to limit TNCs would be like prohibiting Netflix because we wanted to protect Blockbuster," Burgess noted.

Indeed. And yet... it's now the law in Seattle. In a city known for having a fairly thriving innovation and tech scene, the city council has just made it clear that innovation that upsets local incumbents just isn't welcome.

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Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,

No conventional scenario accounts for the methodical disabling of the communications systems, the bizarre altitude changes and professional navigation to way points, or the presumed turn south and a flight path that extended to at least 8:11 a.m.

UPDATE ON POSSIBLE DEBRIS: the 24-meter (79-feet) object is located far to the south of the search field indicated on the map below. The remote area is known as a floating junkyard, so while this could be yet another false lead, it appears to be the only credible lead at this point: If this is the debris of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, what happens next?

Every plausible theory about what happened to Flight 370 has to not only fit the most reliable facts (radar tracks and satellite data) but basic geography. A widely circulated scenario proposed by Chris Goodfellow theorizes that a fire (from either a smoldering front tire or electrical fire) filled the cockpit with smoke and caused the pilots to head for the nearest major runway which happened to be to the west on Langkawi.

The reason why the transponder and ACARS systems were deactivated is the pilots pulled all the fuses in an attempt to control the electrical fire.

In Goodfellow's reconstruction, this gallant effort failed and the pilots were overcome by fumes and lost consciousness. The aircraft then flew on the westward heading on autopilot until it ran out of fuel and crashed into the sea.

This scenario has been critiqued on a number of points: Here's What Pilots Think About The New Idea That The Missing Plane Flew For Hours After A Fire Killed The Pilots documents that full-face oxygen masks were easily accessible, nixing the notion that the pilots could not possibly have had time to radio air traffic control.

A “Startlingly Simple Theory” About the Missing Airliner is Sweeping the Internet. It’s Wrong addresses other problems with the scenario.

I've prepared a map with the "it has to be somewhere along this line" arc based on satellite data and Flight 370's last known west-bound heading. This heading has been confirmed by both Malaysian and Thai military radar.

if the pilots lost consciousness and the aircraft continued west on autopilot, the 777 would have been approaching India before its fuel ran and and it ditched into the sea. This is not even close to the arc traced by the satellite transmission at 8:11 a.m.

This map also eliminates theories that have Flight 370 being diverted to Diego Garcia, a U.S./British military base 1,200 southwest of Sri Lanka. According to my information, Flight 370 had 108,247 pounds of fuel, nowhere near its maximum capacity but more than enough to reach Beijing. Thus there is no way MH370 could have made it to Diego Garcia. The fact the the last satellite transmission was 8:11 a.m. suggests the aircraft crashed before the next automated ping could be sent.

The problem is that various pieces of data do not support conventional scenarios based on past losses of commercial airliners. We can start with the fact that the Boeing 777 is one of the safest aircraft in commercial use. The only fatalities occurred quite recently as a result of pilot error.

The fire scenario in which pilots can't find time to radio ATC (air traffic control) but they manage to navigate multiple way points using the flight computer is not plausible. Not only do the masks and the safety record of the 777 make this a stretch (not to mention that a DC-8 is not necessarily a useful analogy to a 777) it's not yet clear (due to conflicting reports) whether the pilots could deactivate the ACARS system from the cockpit; some reports suggest that requires opening a floor compartment in the aisle outside the cockpit.

The methodical disabling of the two separate communications systems is inconsistent with an emergency that allowed the pilots enough time to change course via the flight computer, navigate to way points and change altitude.

The bizarre altitude changes (climbing to 45,000 feet, well beyond the aircraft's designed ceiling and then descending to 23,000 feet, according to Malaysian military radar) and lengthy flight path along navigational way points do not align with the pilot suicide scenario. In the two previous instances of pilot suicide (both denied by the host nations for reasons of face), the suicidal pilot dove the aircraft into the sea early in the flight.

The complex flight path westward does not align with this unless the pilot was aiming to ditch the aircraft beyond the reach of recovery. And if this were the goal, why climb to 45,000 feet and then descend to 23,000?

My pilot sources report that the 777 (along with all other commercial aircraft) are designed to fly within a narrow envelope of efficiency to conserve fuel. It's pushing the envelope hard to take an almost fully loaded airliner above its designed ceiling (around 43,000 feet). What possible motivation could there have been for this action, and the subsequent drop to 23,000 feet?

A struggle with hijackers comes to mind, but there is no solid evidence that any of the passengers or other crew members had the motivation or training to hijack the aircraft and either fly the 777 in the professional manner demonstrated or coerce the pilots to disable the communications systems and proceed west.

The passage over known Malaysian military bases suggests to some observers that the pilots may have been trying to draw a response, i.e. force the Malaysian Air Force to scramble fighters, but this did not happen.

That leaves a struggle between captain and co-pilot as one explanation for the wild changes in altitude, but if that occurred, the rogue pilot retained control and the communication systems remained off.

Since there is no evidence (after 12 days) that Flight 370 headed north and landed or crashed on land, official speculation has turned to the southern arc.

In order to reach the southern reaches of the arc, Flight 370 had to have turned south sometime after Malaysian and Thai military radar lost contact with the 777 around 2:30 a.m. Once again, this decision (the only possible choice left if the northern route has been ruled out) does not align with hijacking aimed at stealing the aircraft or holding the passengers hostage, given the paucity of potential landing sites. And if the presumed hijacking was intended to be an act of terrorism that murdered all 239 people on board, why fly the 777 six hours beyond the point when the presumed hijackers took control of the cockpit?

While it is certainly possible that the pilots were incapacitated by some event after they turned the aircraft south and the 777 flew on autopilot until it crashed somewhere close to this arc, the fact that the aircraft was obviously being piloted up to that turn south only deepens the mystery.

No conventional scenario accounts for the methodical disabling of the communications systems, the bizarre altitude changes and professional navigation to way points, or the presumed turn south and a flight path that extended to at least 8:11 a.m., almost six hours after the aircraft flew beyond the Malaysian military radar's range.

As noted in my previous entries on Flight 370, it is possible that the U.S. Navy's SOSUS (Sound Surveillance System)(Wikipedia) may be active in the region of interest. According to this article on the Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS), an advanced version was put in place in the mid-2000s.

On 26 April 1999 Lockheed Martin Corp., Manassas, Va., was awarded a $107,031,978 firm-fixed-price contract for Phase II of a deep water, undersea surveillance system. This system is a long life, passive acoustic surveillance system that can be configured for multiple mission applications. It has the capability to provide long-term barrier and field acoustic surveillance, long-range acoustic surveillance coverage of open ocean areas, and acoustic surveillance in areas with high ambient noise. This contract contains one option, which, if exercised, would bring the total cumulative value of this contract to $153,234,288.

Although there is no public indication that the SOSUS system detected an acoustic signal that could have been Flight 370 crashing into the sea, we can anticipate that no public announcement would be made. Rather, various naval assets would be directed to search in the appropriate area.

Unfortunately, even if the black box is recovered, we may never know what transpired in the cockpit from 1:00 a.m. on, as the black box only records the previous two hours of cockpit voice data (it records 25 hours of other flight data). If the aircraft was on autopilot those last two hours (or was flown by a silent human pilot), there may well be little record of events in the cockpit prior to the two-hour mark.

It increasingly appears to be a mystery that will never be solved with any certainty.

My previous entry on Flight 370:
Finally, a Plausible Scenario of What Happened to Flight 370 (March 17, 2014)

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One of my favorite services for self-pay patients is Medibid, which allows doctors to bid on providing medical treatments for patients. Back in December, in a blog post on medical tourism, I included the case of Perry Hunt, a 50-year old in California who needed hip replacement surgery. This is the description that originally appeared in a Men’s Health article, which I pasted into my post:

This past June, MediBid helped Perry Hunt, a 50-year-old home developer in Orange County, California, get a new right hip in Texas. Hunt’s local surgeon said the operation would cost $100,000. Hunt was uninsured and did not want to pay that. MediBid had found quotes for India ($8,000), another hospital in California an hour from Hunt’s home ($14,450), and one in San Antonio ($21,000).

Hunt did not want to travel overseas. And even though the Texas surgery would cost far more than the nearby California alternative, he chose to go there because the doctor could perform the procedure with an anterior approach, going in through the front of the hip rather than the buttocks or side, and avoiding cutting through muscle, which makes for less trauma to the body and a speedier recovery…. Hunt was back to playing golf within four months. “I was up walking the very next day,” says Hunt. “I was able to go home the day following surgery, as well, and was given exercises as my rehab. I couldn’t be happier with the results of my experience and the surgery”

Hunt has now done a video describing his experience, which runs about 25 minutes. I thought it would be worth posting here so you can see him talk about how he wound up going through Medibid, his experiences as a self-pay patient, and the quality of the care he received. So here it is: