Jts5665

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:

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On the day of his inauguration in 2009, President Barack Obama announced that his administration would be "the most open and transparent in history." It did not take long for that promise to be tossed aside, and it has been clear for quite a while that this administration is perhaps the most secretive in history. A new analysis by the AP of how the administration responds to FOIA requests confirms that it is becoming even more secretive each year:

The Obama administration more often than ever censored government files or outright denied access to them last year under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, according to a new analysis of federal data by The Associated Press.

Basically, the administration is doing everything possible to keep information secret. Despite President Obama's memo to the federal government upon taking office on the importance of openness in responding to FOIA requests, the government has done exactly the opposite. His memo, you may recall, stated:

The Freedom of Information Act should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails. The Government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears. Nondisclosure should never be based on an effort to protect the personal interests of Government officials at the expense of those they are supposed to serve. In responding to requests under the FOIA, executive branch agencies (agencies) should act promptly and in a spirit of cooperation, recognizing that such agencies are servants of the public.

All agencies should adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure, in order to renew their commitment to the principles embodied in FOIA, and to usher in a new era of open Government. The presumption of disclosure should be applied to all decisions involving FOIA.

The presumption of disclosure also means that agencies should take affirmative steps to make information public. They should not wait for specific requests from the public. All agencies should use modern technology to inform citizens about what is known and done by their Government. Disclosure should be timely.

Compare that to the reality:

In a year of intense public interest over the National Security Agency's surveillance programs, the government cited national security to withhold information a record 8,496 times — a 57 percent increase over a year earlier and more than double Obama's first year, when it cited that reason 3,658 times. The Defense Department, including the NSA, and the CIA accounted for nearly all those. The Agriculture Department's Farm Service Agency cited national security six times, the Environmental Protection Agency did twice and the National Park Service once.

And five years after Obama directed agencies to less frequently invoke a "deliberative process" exception to withhold materials describing decision-making behind the scenes, the government did it anyway, a record 81,752 times.

Yes. It appears that "the most transparent administration in history" has never been all that transparent, and it's only getting worse.

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Walter Olson

From a Baltimore Sun article on the regulatory fate of car-sharing services Uber and Lyft, bitterly attacked by their more highly regulated taxi competitors: 

At a recent work session on the issue, Kelley [Sen. Delores G. Kelley, D-Baltimore County] rejected the contention from Lyft and Uber that it’s a matter of consumer choice about whether to use the application to book a ride and they won’t do it if the price is too high. 

“We regulate all sorts of things because the general public is not smart enough to know when they’re about to be fleeced,” Kelley said.

But what about members of the general public who are smart enough to know they’re about to be fleeced, but are unable to do anything about it because it’s lawmakers and market incumbents combining to make that happen? 

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Yesterday, I came home exhausted.  I have been working late nearly every night for weeks, at a time of year when most of my business is not even open yet (the business is seasonal).  I realized to my immense depression that I have been spending all my time on regulatory compliance.  I have not been pitching new clients or bidding on new prospects or making investments or improving our customer service processes -- though I have ideas for all of these.  I have been 100% dedicated through 14 hour days to just trying to keep up with and adapt to changing government rules.

Break rules, changing minimum wages, heat stress plans, mandatory sexual harassment training, OSHA reporting, EEO reporting, Census reporting, and most recently changing rules on salaried workers that Obama just waived his wand and imposed -- this is what has been consuming me.  I have been trying to roll out a new safety program to the field and can't do it because I keep having to train for one of these new requirements (one learns there is only a limited number of things one can simultaneously roll out to front-line staff).

At some point regulation will accrete so fast that it will be impossible to keep up.  I am going to call that the Regulation Singularity, and for businesses my size, we are fast approaching it.

Prominent libertarian think tanks often rank state business climate by their tax regimes.  I am all for low, sensibly-structured taxes.  But for most of my time, taxes are irrelevant.  We are shutting down businesses left and right in California and it has zero to do with taxes.

In a couple of recent posts, including part six of Character vs. Chemistry, I wrote that the Grand Plans designed by The Anointed to battle obesity will fail because those plans are based on the belief that weight loss is about character, not chemistry.  Well, in the interest of fairness, I feel obligated to point out that not every Grand Plan imposed on us by The Anointed fails because of biochemical ignorance.  Most fail because of economic ignorance.

In fact, to believe that the typical Grand Plan proposed by The Anointed will actually work, you pretty much have to be an economic illiterate.  You have to believe, for example, that young people who already refuse to buy inexpensive health insurance will flock to buy insurance that costs three times as much if you just run some cute ads encouraging them to spend the holidays wearing pajamas and drinking hot chocolate and #GetTalking with their parents about insurance.  That’s how The Anointed believe it should work, so by gosh, that’s how it will work.

Which brings me another Grand Plan to battle obesity:  spending taxpayer money to make sure plenty of fruits and vegetables are available in poor neighborhoods.  That’s why so many poor people are fat, ya see … they don’t have access to the magical fruits and vegetables that guarantee weight loss.  And of course, if we just make the magical fruits and vegetables available, poor people will flock to buy them (elbowing young people flocking to buy expensive insurance out of the way in the process), eat those vegetables, and then lose weight.  That’s how The Anointed believe it should work, so by gosh, that’s how it will work.

If you’re a long-time reader, you may recall that I’ve pointed out the economic fallacies in that Grand Plan before.  Here’s what I wrote in a post three years ago:

Here’s a simple economics lesson:  businesses don’t determine what consumers will buy.  Consumer behavior determines what businesses will produce and sell.  If fast food restaurants thrive in poor neighborhoods while stores that sell fresh fruit and vegetables don’t, there’s a good reason for it.  Using tax dollars to bring more fruits and vegetables to areas where people don’t buy fruits and vegetables isn’t going to reduce childhood obesity.  It’s just going to lead to a lot of rotten fruits and vegetables.

In fact, one corner-store owner in Philadelphia agreed, at the urging of The Anointed, to sell 15-cent bags of apple slices so poor kids would eat more fruit.  He ended up throwing most of them away – at a loss of $500 to his business.

Here’s what I wrote in another post two years ago:

Even if we’re talking about neighborhoods where there truly aren’t as many vegetables being sold, people get the causality backwards.  The local residents aren’t fat because they don’t have access to vegetables.  The vegetables aren’t available because people don’t buy them.

… Here’s what people like Mrs. Obama can’t seem to grasp:  if enough people in those neighborhoods wanted lettuce and fruit in their kids’ lunches, plenty of greedy capitalists would happily move in to sell them.

… No problem then.  The government’s on the job and planning a comprehensive response.  That of course means a really expensive and ultimately futile response.

Well, I guess that depends on your definition of really expensive.  Since I don’t work in the federal government, a figure of, say, $500 million sounds to me like a huge waste if some comprehensive response doesn’t work.  (I mean, geez, imagine if you spent nearly double that on a crappy web site that didn’t work and then had to go spend even more to get it fixed.)

But of course, part of what makes it so awesomely wonderful about being a member of The Anointed is that you get to spend other people’s money to institute your Grand Plans.  No need to start small to test your theory.  No need to try opening Uncle Sam’s Cheep Fruits and Veggie Stand in a few poor neighborhoods to see if people eat more vegetables and lose weight.  No need to stock some existing grocery stores with cheap fruit and track the sales.  Nope, if you’re a member of The Anointed, you may as well go whole-hog and plunk down $500 million in taxpayer dollars.

So here are the latest results:

With the obesity epidemic in full swing and millions of American living in neighborhoods where fruits and vegetables are hard to come by, the Obama administration thought it saw a solution: fund stores that will stock fresh, affordable produce in these deprived areas.

But now, three years and $500 million into the federal Healthy Food Financing Initiative, there’s a problem: A study suggests it’s not working.

Adding supermarkets to areas with short supplies of fresh produce does not lead to improvements in residents’ diets or health outcomes, according to a report published Monday in the February issue of Health Affairs.

So The Anointed in government thought they saw an untapped market for fruits and vegetables that the greedy capitalists somehow missed, but it turns out they were wrong.  Boy, I’ll bet nobody saw that coming.

When a grocery store was opened in one Philadelphia food desert, 26.7 percent of residents made it their main grocery store and 51.4 percent indicated using it for any food shopping, the report found. But among the population that used the new supermarket, the researchers saw no significant improvement in BMI, fruit and vegetable intake, or perceptions of food accessibility, although there was a significant improvement in perception of accessibility to fruits and vegetables.

Well, if people perceive that they have more access to fruits and vegetables without actually buying them, that’s certainly worth $500 million … although it would have been cheaper to just run TV ads telling them that fruits and vegetables were in great supply.

The report was authored by a team of researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Penn State University’s departments of sociology, anthropology, and demography. The study was funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences with support from the Population Research Institute, although neither had a hand in the research design, collection, or analysis.

Awesome.  So we’re spending taxpayer money to study why spending taxpayer money on yet another Grand Plan didn’t work.  Is this a great country or what?

The study needs to be replicated in other neighborhoods and other parts of the United States to confirm or refute these findings, said lead researcher Steven Cummins, professor of population health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. The results do, however, mirror findings in the U.K., where researchers created a similar comparison of two neighborhoods in Scotland and observed no net effect on fruit and vegetable intake.

Wow.  It’s almost as if the laws of economics apply all over the world.  But we don’t know that for sure, so we really need to spend more taxpayer money to confirm that spending taxpayer money on yet another Grand Plan didn’t work.

And if the conclusion is borne out, it would suggest that policymakers rethink the Healthy Food Financing Initiative if they want to promote healthier eating and healthier citizens.

Hmmm, let’s see if I can remember what The Anointed conclude when a Grand Plan fails … okay, it came to me:

• The plan was good but people didn’t implement it correctly because they’re stupid.
• The plan was undermined by people who opposed it because they’re evil.
• The plan didn’t go far enough – we need to do same thing again only bigger.

Cummins said in an email that lawmakers ought to consider policies that will change community behavior to incorporate healthy food into everyday diets.

“These might include economic initiatives such as taxes on unhealthy foods and subsidies on healthy foods, marketing initiatives that focus on in-store promotion of healthy food, and programs that focus on skills related to buying and cooking components of a balanced diet,” Cummins said.

Yeah, what we need to do is spend even more taxpayer money trying to tell people what to eat – because it’s worked so well so far.  Then if that doesn’t work, we can spend more taxpayer money to study why spending taxpayer didn’t work.  Oh, and let’s tax the unhealthy foods too.

Anyone care to bet that The Anointed would correctly identify the “unhealthy” foods?

One of the most shocking of Snowden's revelations was that the NSA and GCHQ are deliberately weakening the Internet's security -- either by undermining standards, or by using zero-day vulnerabilities to break into systems. More recent news about the huge scale of attempts to infect computers with malware only compounds that outrage. It's hard to convey to ordinary Internet users the seriousness of what the NSA and GCHQ have done here, but in a brilliant new column in the Guardian, it looks like Cory Doctorow has done just that:

I think there's a good case to be made for security as an exercise in public health. It sounds weird at first, but the parallels are fascinating and deep and instructive.

Here's the basic insight:

If you discovered that your government was hoarding information about water-borne parasites instead of trying to eradicate them; if you discovered that they were more interested in weaponising typhus than they were in curing it, you would demand that your government treat your water-supply with the gravitas and seriousness that it is due.

Because that is precisely what the spying agencies are doing: they are intentionally withholding vital information about threats to your digital health -- the fact that programs you use are vulnerable to infections with malware, or that key security technologies you depend upon have backdoors -- regardless of the serious consequences this might have for you. If you try to imagine doctors doing the same in the case of equivalent threats to your health, you begin to get an idea of the depth of betrayal felt by computer professionals here. Doctorow goes on to point out that this is not just a matter of personal harm; the NSA and GCHQ are degrading the basic digital infrastructure of modern life:

This is the most alarming part of the Snowden revelations: not just that spies are spying on all of us -- that they are actively sabotaging all of our technical infrastructure to ensure that they can continue to spy on us.

There is no way to weaken security in a way that makes it possible to spy on "bad guys" without making all of us vulnerable to bad guys, too. The goal of national security is totally incompatible with the tactic of weakening the nation's information security.

"Virus" has been a term of art in the security world for decades, and with good reason. It's a term that resonates with people, even people with only a cursory grasp of technology. As we strive to make the public and our elected representatives understand what's at stake, let's expand that pathogen/epidemiology metaphor. We'd never allow MI5 to suppress information on curing typhus so they could attack terrorists by infecting them with it. We need to stop allowing the NSA and GCHQ to suppress information on fixing bugs in our computers, phones, cars, houses, planes, and bodies.

Doctorow is right on both counts: we can't allow the NSA and GCHQ to withhold vital information that endangers the digital fabric of society, and the way to stop them is to use this public health metaphor to get that message across to politicians and the general public.

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Submitted by Nick Giambruno via Doug Casey's International Man blog,

Most readers are familiar with Peter Schiff. He is a financial commentator and author, CEO of Euro Pacific Capital, and is known for accurately predicting the 2008 financial crisis.

He also has a very keen understanding of internationalization. Peter shares with me his strategies in this must-read discussion below that I am happy to bring exclusively to International Man readers. (If you are not already a member, you can join for free here.)

Nick Giambruno: Peter, do you see the potential for another financial crisis in the US playing out in the not-so-distant future?

Peter Schiff: Unfortunately, yes. I mean, how soon is very difficult to tell. In fact, right now you’ve got a high level of complacency. The stock markets are rallying to new highs, nominal highs. People seem to be convinced that the worst is behind us, that the central banks of the world have solved their problems by papering them over. But, you know, I don’t think they’ve solved anything. I think they’ve compounded the underlying problems that caused the last crisis, and so now the next crisis will be that much worse because of what the central banks did, in particular the Federal Reserve.

The Fed is right now trying to prop the economy up, the housing market up with cheap money, and it is operating under the delusion that one day it can take that cheap money away and the economy and the housing market will just sustain on their own, but that’s not possible. The Fed is building an economy that is completely dependent on that cheap money. And so if you take it away, the economy implodes, but if you don’t take it away, then it’s worse.

Nick Giambruno: So what measures do you see coming into place—things such as capital controls?

Peter Schiff: Well, certainly as currencies depreciate, governments look to try to find ways to stop the bleeding. What’s really is going on with inflation is that you have a huge transfer of wealth from savers and lenders to debtors, and of course the US government is the world’s biggest debtor, but a lot of American voters are in debt too.

If you’re a saver and you don’t want to watch your assets confiscated through the printing press, then you’re going to try to protect yourself. You might do that by moving your dollars abroad, converting them to foreign currencies, trying to get out of harm’s way, and that’s when you have the government potentially coming in with capital controls.

Putting taxes on foreign currency transactions or maybe outright prohibiting them altogether, that will make it more difficult for you or more expensive to take protective measures. I think we’ve already got the beginnings of capital controls in the United States. The government is making it very difficult for Americans to do business abroad. Many foreign financial institutions, banks, and even bullion depositories are refusing to do business with American citizens for fear of retaliation by the IRS or other government agencies.

Nick Giambruno: So what can Americans and others living under a desperate government do to minimize this risk?

Peter Schiff: Well, the first thing that you could do is minimize your purchasing power risk. So you don’t have to get your money into a foreign bank or foreign brokerage account to get out of the dollar. I help Americans diversify globally within a US account, but their portfolio consists of foreign assets, whether it’s foreign bonds, government bonds, corporate bonds, foreign stocks, dividend-paying stocks, commodities, or precious metals. These are all things that will protect purchasing power in an inflationary time period, and things that the federal government—the Federal Reserve—can’t levy the inflation tax on.

If you’re more worried about political risk—about the US government seizing your assets—then you want to take the next step. This is not just getting out of the dollar, but getting your money out of the country. But again, the US government is making that more difficult right now.

I know personally. I set up a foreign brokerage firm as a subsidiary of my foreign bank, which I also set up, called Euro Pacific Bank. I did this predominantly for foreigners who were having trouble investing with my US brokerage firm. The securities rules and regulations are now so onerous that it almost caused me to view any foreigner as a terrorist. So if somebody in Australia wanted to open up an account with me, there was so much paperwork involved that oftentimes they would just give up halfway through the process. So what I did is I set up this foreign bank so that I wouldn’t have to operate under those confines, so I can be more competitive to a foreign investor, but I can’t offer these services to Americans.

My foreign bank is no different than many other foreign banks. In order to really protect the privacy of my foreign customers, I can’t accept American customers. And if I accepted American customers, my compliance cost would be so high that I would have to charge my foreign customers more for transactions to try to stay in business. So to mitigate all that regulation and the potential of having to share all the information on my foreign clients with the US government, I’m just not taking American customers with my foreign bank.

Nick Giambruno: So Euro Pacific Bank, where is it headquartered and why did you choose that jurisdiction?

Peter Schiff: It’s in St Vincent and the Grenadines (the Caribbean). I did it for a number of reasons: it’s close to me, but also because of the banking laws. You have secrecy, privacy, and you have no tax. They’re not going to impose any income tax on my company as an offshore bank, they’re also not going to impose any taxes, any withholding taxes on my bank’s customers’ interest income or their capital gains. And no one is going to pierce the wall of secrecy. You’re going to have to go in to a St. Vincent’s court and get a local court order to get any information from my bank.

The bank is regulated, but it’s not nearly as onerous as the type of regulations that I would face trying to do this business from the United States. In fact, some of the things we’re doing offshore might be completely impossible because they would no longer be economically viable if I tried to do them in America, but I can do them offshore because the government doesn’t impose these artificial barriers.

(Editor’s Note: You can find out more about Euro Pacific Bank here.)

Nick Giambruno: Generally speaking, which countries are you particularly bullish on?

Peter Schiff: It’s kind of like a monetary or economic triage; I’m always looking around the world to see which countries are in the least bad shape, which countries are the least reckless and the least irresponsible. You really can’t find any one country that’s doing it perfectly. You just have to find the ones that are making the fewest mistakes.

And I think high on that list are Singapore and Hong Kong. Those markets are relatively free of regulation, free of taxation. I mean, it’s not nonexistent, but on a relative basis you have a lot more freedom there, and so you have a lot more prosperity there. You have much better economic fundamentals. And not just in those two places, but in Southeast Asia in general, in a lot of the emerging economies, you’ll find a lot less government and a lot more freedom. People are working harder, they’re saving, they’re producing, and they’re exporting. You don’t have these trade deficits, budget deficits, and you don’t have armies of people looking to retire on government entitlements. In Europe, we still like Switzerland even though they are making mistakes tying their currency to the euro. I think eventually they will change that policy. Scandinavia, we have been investors in Norway, we’ve been investors in Sweden. Also Australia and New Zealand have been longtime favorites. We’ve been investing down there or even closer to home in Canada. We do have some investments in South America. We’re diversifying around the world trying to get into the right countries, the right currencies, the right asset classes.

Nick Giambruno: On a different note, we’ve seen the number of US citizens renouncing their citizenship sharply increase. We have also seen high-profile people like Tina Turner and Eduardo Saverin give up their US citizenship. Would Tina be eligible to use Euro Pacific Bank?

Peter Schiff: Yes, once you renounce your US citizenship. The only people who can’t bank with me are American citizens, or green card holders. So once you are no longer an American citizen, as long as you don’t reside in the United States, then you are welcome at the bank.

I think a lot of people are doing this obviously for tax reasons, although they can’t necessarily claim it’s for tax reasons. You have to fill out a form if you want to renounce your citizenship—which, by the way, you can only get from a foreign embassy or consulate. Those forms used to be free. Now they’re $500 apiece. So think about that. If they can charge you $500 for that form, they could charge $5,000, they could charge $5,000,000. They could basically make it impossible for you to leave. And they’re trying to make it more difficult ever since Eduardo Saverin from Facebook went to Singapore. Now the government is trying to come up with all sorts of ways to punish Americans who try to give up their citizenship, and this really is the sign of a nation in decay. Fifty years ago, nobody would want to give up American citizenship. They would cherish it. The fact that so many people are paying tremendous amounts of money to get this albatross off their neck shows you how much times have changed, that an American passport is not an asset to be cherished but a liability that people are willing to pay to get rid of.

Nick Giambruno: And what about yourself? Do you believe you are adequately diversified internationally?

Peter Schiff: I think my investments are; I own a lot of foreign stocks. I have a lot of precious metals, I have a lot of mining shares. But I still live in the United States, so I’m obviously still vulnerable here. My family is here, so I haven’t done anything about a physical exit strategy. Although I do think I have financial resources that would afford me the ability to relocate, but I haven’t actually taken any steps other than setting up a foreign business. I have the foreign bank in the Caribbean. I have a brokerage firm Euro Pacific Canada, and so I’ve got offices up there. I’m also thinking about opening up an office in Singapore and trying to move more of my business—particularly my asset management business—to move it from the US. Not only because of favorable tax treatment outside the US, but because of the regulatory environment. If you want to be globally competitive, you need to be in an area where you can minimize these costs because if I have those costs and my competitors don’t, then I am at a disadvantage. And also because I think that over time people are going to be more and more hesitant about sending their money to the United States. So if I’m going to manage money, I might have to manage it offshore, because I think people will be worried about sending it here. They might be worried that the US government might take it.

If it ever gets really, really bad that you feel that you have to leave, by then it might be illegal to take any gold or silver out of the country. Right now you can take more than $10,000 worth of cash or cash equivalents—which would include gold bullion—out of the country as long as you tell the government that you’re taking it. And if you don’t tell them and they catch you, there’s a big fine and jail penalty. But one day it might not be the case. It might be that you are prohibited from taking any significant amount of money out of the country, and who knows what the penalty might be if they catch you. But if it’s already out of the country, then you don’t have to worry, because you’re leaving with nothing and the money is on the other side of the border waiting for you.

Nick Giambruno: So the idea is to preempt capital controls?

Peter Schiff: Yeah, well, you get out the window before they slam it shut. That’s the whole idea, and right now those windows are shutting all around as more and more offshore institutions are saying “no thank you” to an American customer. But the other reason that you want to act sooner too is if they impose exchange controls or fees on purchasing precious metals. They don’t ban them, but they have a big tax on the transaction or a big tax on the foreign exchange. If you want to buy Swiss francs, they can have a transaction tax. You want to get your money out of the dollar before those taxes are imposed, because if you wait until they’re imposed, then you can’t get as much money out, because a lot of it is being lost to taxes. In getting out of the dollar, you’re trying to avoid the inflation tax, but they’re hitting you with some other kind of tax in the process because that’s really what they are trying to do. A lot of people are worrying about the income tax or the estate tax and they go through elaborate means to try to minimize those taxes, but then they leave themselves vulnerable to what might be the biggest tax of all: and that’s the inflation tax. So you have to act to protect yourself before so many people are trying to protect themselves that the government makes it almost impossible to do so.

Editor’s Note: Internationalization is your ultimate insurance policy. Whether it’s with a second passport, offshore physical gold storage, or other measures, it is critically important that you dilute the amount of control the bureaucrats in your home country wield over you by diversifying your political risk. You can find Casey Research’s A-Z guide on internationalization by clicking here.

easyriderr:

TL;DR : Watch this incredible story in video

this is beautiful

Despite the relentless protests of Kiev, and of course the G7 group of world's most indebted nations, in the past two weeks Vladimir Putin once again succeeded in outplaying the west and annexed the Crimea penninsula without firing a single shot (granted there is still potential for material situational deterioration, one which would involve military participation by NATO whose outcome is not exactly clear). The market has "priced in" as much, with prevailing consensus now dictating that Russia will preserve its foothold in the Crimea however without additional attempts for annexation: certainly Poland is hoping and praying as much.

However, as the following photos taken on the Russian side of East Ukraine, one next to Belgorod, and one in the proximity of Rostov, the Russian tanks are now piling up, only not in Crimea, which needs no further Russian military presence, but ostensibly to prepare for the next part of the annexation: that of Russian-speaking east Ukraine.

On the picture below, one can see Russian troops on the move near the border with Ukraine in the Belgorod Oblast, about 20 kilometers from the border with Ukraine near Kharkiv:

)

The indicative location:

 

Meanwhile, on the birder with Crimea, Ukrainian troops are digging in and mining fields in anticipation of Russians rolling out of the Penninsula:

)

H/T @raymond_saint, Censor.net

…. is from an interview with legal scholar Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness“:

Portugal is an excellent example of how it is possible to reduce addiction and abuse and drug related crime in a non-punitive manner without filling prisons and jails. Supposedly, we criminalize drugs because we are so concerned about the harm they cause people, but we wind up inflicting far more pain and suffering than the substances themselves. What are we doing really when we criminalize drugs is not criminalizing substances, but people.

I support a wholesale shift to a public health model for dealing with drug addiction and abuse. How would we treat people abusing if we really cared about them? Would we put them in a cage, saddle them with criminal records that will force them into legal discrimination the rest of their lives? I support the decriminalization of all drugs for personal use. If you possess a substance, we should help you get education and support, not demonize, shame, and punish you for the rest of your life.

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(First column, 15th story, link)

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