5 August 2009 @ 11:59PM >> The Obama White House may be breaking the Privacy Act of 1974 by asking citizens to report “fishy” political speech.

On Tuesday, Macon Phillips, President Obama’s Director of New Media, wrote on the White House blog asking citizens to rat out fellow citizens who are spreading “disinformation” about Obama’s plans for more government control over the health care system. Phillips wrote:

There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.

One wonders, what constitutes “fishy” speech or “disinformation”? Is it anything that runs counter to what the White House wants you to think? And what, precisely, is the White House planning to do about someone who’s speech has been “flagged”?

It turns out, even asking for citizens to report on each other may be illegal. According to the Department of Justice, “the purpose of the Privacy Act is to balance the government’s need to maintain information about individuals with the rights of individuals to be protected against unwarranted invasions of their privacy stemming from federal agencies’ collection, maintenance, use, and disclosure of personal information about them.”

Further, anything is considered a “personal record” if it identifies an individual (an e-mail address would qualify), and “federal agency” specifically includes “the Executive Office of the President.”

I’m no lawyer, but it sure sounds like the White House is violating the law by asking people to snitch on their friends and neighbors for engaging in “fishy” political speech. Anyone want to try this one in court?

In the meantime, I’m going to report myself. I’m obviously not thinking the way our Dear Leader wants...

---

Update: Renowned attorney David T. Hardy identifies another area where the Obama White House appears to be breaking the law:

5 US Code §552a(e)(7) commands that any Federal agency

“(7) maintain no record describing how any individual exercises rights guaranteed by the First Amendment unless expressly authorized by statute or by the individual about whom the record is maintained or unless pertinent to and within the scope of an authorized law enforcement activity;”

3 August 2009 @ 4:52PM >> The tentacles of Big Brother are reaching further into homes in the U.K.:

Thousands of the worst families in England are to be put in “sin bins” in a bid to change their bad behaviour, Ed Balls announced yesterday.

The Children’s Secretary set out £400 million plans to put 20,000 problem families under 24-hour [closed-circuit television] supervision in their own homes.

They will be monitored to ensure that children attend school, go to bed on time and eat proper meals.

It’s just the first step, and one that likely won’t be criticized, since these are problem families and someone must think of the children!

But the way incrementalism works, once this step is taken, it makes it easier for the next step to be taken.

That’s why further government involvement in healthcare is worrisome; it will lead to more extreme versions of proposals like these:

• Sodas should be taxed more to fight obesity
• Fat people should be subjected to added food taxes to try to make them healthier
• Eating meat is unhealthy and contributes to global warming, so let’s encourage vegan diets

If the Nanny Staters have their way, the government will be controlling your diet in the future, maybe even installing closed-circuit cameras in your fridge to make sure you’re not midnight snacking.

Think it can’t happen? Open your eyes.

27 July 2009 @ 4:15PM >> Peggy Noonan identifies one of the many reasons that I’m concerned about the government getting more control over our healthcare system:

We are living in a time in which educated people who are at the top of American life feel they have the right to make very public criticisms of . . . let’s call it the private, pleasurable but health-related choices of others. They shame smokers and the overweight. Drinking will be next. Mr. Obama’s own choice for surgeon general has come under criticism as too heavy.

Only a generation ago such criticisms would have been considered rude and unacceptable. But they are part of the ugly, chafing price of having the government in something: Suddenly it can make big and very personal demands on you. Those who live in a way that isn’t sufficiently healthy “cost us money” and “drive up premiums.” Mr. Obama himself said something like it in his press conference, when he spoke of a person who might not buy health insurance. If he gets hit by a bus, “the rest of us have to pay for it.”

Under a national health-care plan we might be hearing that a lot. You don’t exercise, you smoke, you drink, you eat too much, and “the rest of us have to pay for it.”

It is a new opportunity for new class professionals (an old phrase that should make a comeback) to shame others, which appears to be one of their hobbies. (It may even be one of their addictions. Let’s stage an intervention.) Every time I hear Kathleen Sebelius talk about “transitioning” from “treating disease” to “preventing disease,” I start thinking of how they’ll use this as an excuse to judge, shame and intrude.

So this might be an unarticulated public fear: When everyone pays for the same health-care system, the overseers will feel more and more a right to tell you how to live, which simple joys are allowed and which are not.

22 June 2009 >> “The federal government is spending $423,500 to find out why men don’t like to wear condoms,” reports Fox News.

I’ll give the government a hint in language they can understand: the words no, stimulus and package could be used in a valid answer.

29 May 2009 @ 6:47PM >> The recent post on the FDA’s regulation of Cheerios as a drug generated a lot of e-mail from readers. Last week, I posted a well-reasoned disagreement with my view on the matter.

Here are a couple more responses:

Maybe the cholesterol lowering qualities are not the result of the Cheerios themselves, but the fact that the person eating Cheerios for breakfast is not eating a food that might increase one’s cholesterol level, i.e. bacon. Would the FDA be justified in stepping in then? I have to imagine if you had a side of bacon (a few slices) with your Cheerios everyday, your cholesterol would not be lower by 4% in 6 weeks. To me this is common sense. Unfortunately, there are too many people out there who have given up thinking for themselves and are reliant upon others telling them what is good and what is bad. Enter the Nanny-state.

And:

I just want to encourage you concerning your take on the FDA regulating Cheerios like a drug. It seems as though we as a nation have completely lost all common sense, and I can hardly take it anymore.

Is it really a revelation that food affects health? Before we became a nation of pill popping hypochondriacs, how do you think we consumed beneficial nutrients?

Since Cheerios might be able to make health claims, and therefore should be treated like a drug, it makes sense that the FDA should also treat milk like a drug, and investigate those potentially spurrious claims that it “does a body good”. Several years ago, there was an opinion that eggs increased cholesterol. Should the FDA have classified eggs as a harmful drug? Where does it end?

Food products are already regulated to require the disclosure of ingredient lists and nutritional information. Any nutritional scientist can consume the information already required of a food manufacturer and conclude potential health benefits and risks. If a product contains 3000mg of sodium per serving, for example, does it really take a clinical study to determine that it is not heart-healthy? You could not use the same method to evaluate Ambien or Prosac.

Of course, I am making my argument based on common sense. Since common sense is rapidly going out of style, perhaps I should just concede. Let’s treat anything healthy like a drug, just to make sure everyone is “safe”. Calling my doctor now to stock up on prescriptions for citrus - need that vitamin C.

20 May 2009 >> Brain Terminal reader Blake I. Markus disagrees with my take on the Food & Drug Administration’s apparent desire to regulate Cheerios:

Evan,

I have a small complaint about your article, Kids! Just Say No... to Cheerios. I normally agree with your sentiments, but this one is hard to swallow.

I am very libertarian when it comes to limiting the control of the federal government. I do not believe the government should regulate individual and ordinary decisions of regular citizens. In the game of life, the government’s role should not be deciding where to move the pieces.

However, the government must act as Milton Bradley and set the rules that make it possible to play the game fairly. Rules such as antitrust laws, banking regulations, and criminal penalties are necessary to ensure the People don’t get screwed in one form or another by other people or businesses who take too much control, engage in fraudulent behavior, or try to otherwise gouge or mislead a consumer.

With regard to your article specifically, it appears that your argument for why the FDA’s decision is a bad one, is that the government is just trying to enforce a rule for the sake of enforcing a rule and engaging in “nanny” behavior.

While I agree that the government, especially as of late, has been engaging more and more in parental decision-making, I think the actions taken by the FDA are correct. The problem isn’t that “idiots might get confused and mistake a bowl of Cheerios for a pile of Lipitor.” The real problem is that the FDA cannot set a precedent of letting products be advertised as giving specific health benefits without meeting the rigorous FDA standards established for that type of advertising.

I’m assuming here that the FDA did not approve the so-called “clinical study” that was done by General Mills, a company who does not do “clinical studies” on a regular basis. If such a precedent were to be set, herbal supplement companies could make specific claims about their products (more specific and more often than they already do) that were not correctly tested.

This decision by the FDA is a difficult one, I must say. I don’t believe there would even be an argument if this scenario were more like an herbal supplement company stating that the ingredients in the supplement will guarantee on average a 10% weight loss and 14% muscle gain, but those studies were based only on clinical trials conducted on lab rats, and the results only counted the rats who were left living after the study was over.

But the sad truth is, even though this is a children’s cereal that is practically an institution among breakfast foods (and late night desserts, as you have pointed out), the rules are in place to prevent harm to the consumer in the face of bad studies. If Cheerios conducted an FDA approved study and it was found that the decrease in cholesterol was negligible and it actually increased the likelihood of testicular cancer in young men, you would likely be changing your tone about this “nanny” decision.

Thank you for your time, and please keep writing your wonderful blog entries. While I had to say something against this entry, I am often pleased by what you have to say.

Regards,

Blake

Thanks for the e-mail, Blake. I think you have a good point with respect to herbal supplements. However, I think the Cheerios case is different in one key respect.

Herbal supplements are intended to improve someone’s health or state of mind. That’s the only reason people buy herbal supplements: to consume them like medication. So regulating them like a drug makes sense to me.

But the original and primary function of Cheerios to fill the stomach and provide the body with energy. Cheerios is tasty, and that’s a nice side-benefit, as is the apparent cholesterol-lowering power. But such benefits are secondary.

Now, if General Mills is making claims about Cheerios that are false, that’s a much more defensible case for government regulation. But in the reporting I’ve seen, nobody disputes the health claims made by General Mills. I haven’t seen anyone question the legitimacy of the studies about Cheerios cholesterol-lowering properties.

So why, then, shouldn’t the burden of proof be on the government?

Before regulating Cheerios like a drug, why doesn’t the government first commission its own independent study and see if the claims about Cheerios are false?

That seems reasonable to me, and it would certainly constitute far less government interference in private enterprise.

That’s my take on it, although I could be wrong. The media reports on this story haven’t exactly been paragons of clarity.

---

Update: In another report, it seems the FDA is questioning the claims of General Mills: “We certainly don’t have any issues with the safety of Cheerios,” Stephen Sundlof, director of the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, said in an interview today. “We just believe that the labeling on this particular product has gone beyond what the science supports.”

13 May 2009 >> Cheerios. It’s a tough habit to break.

I should know. I’ve been there.

There have been many nights when my dessert consisted of a bowl of Cheerios. On certain nights, two or more.

So I understand how hard it is to extricate oneself from the clutches of such a potent addiction.

I understand why Our Benevolent Nanny, the federal government, treats Cheerios like a drug:

The FDA has sent a warning letter to General Mills, telling the company that its claims about the health benefits of eating Cheerios “would cause it to be a drug because the product is intended for use in the prevention, mitigation and treatment of disease.”

The problem: Cheerios are a food not a drug, the FDA notes in the letter, which was sent May 5 but was posted on the agency’s website today. Thus, claims that the 68-year-old whole-grain oat cereal lowers cholesterol and reduces the risk of heart disease and cancer violates federal law, the agency said.

[...]

The FDA was particularly unhappy about assertions on Cheerios boxes and its website that eating the cereal can “lower your cholesterol 4% in 6 weeks.” The FDA counters that the cereal must be approved as a drug before making such specific health claims.

General Mills spokesman Tom Forsythe said the cholesterol-lowering claim has been featured on the Cheerios box for more than two years and that the heart health claim was approved by the FDA 12 years ago. On April 20, General Mills announced results of a clinical study that showed eating two daily servings of Cheerios (1 1/2 cups each) can reduce cholesterol 10% in just a month.

“The science is not in question,” he said. “The scientific body of evidence supporting the heart health claim was the basis for FDA’s approval of the heart health claim, and the clinical study supporting Cheerios’ cholesterol-lowering benefits is very strong.”

Forsythe said the company looks forward “to discussing this with the FDA and to reaching a resolution.” General Mills faces seizure of products or an injunction against making and distributing Cheerios.

As the Los Angeles Times reports the story, it seems that the government’s complaint about the cholesterol claim isn’t that it is false. The problem, according to the FDA, is that because Cheerios is effective at lowering cholesterol, idiots might get confused and mistake a bowl of Cheerios for a pile of Lipitor.

According to government regulations, if Cheerios provides the health benefits claimed, that fact itself is all that’s needed for the government to treat it as a drug. Nevermind that it isn’t a drug. Nevermind that, for decades, schoolchildren have understood that Cheerios is food. Nevermind that. This is the government and the rules must be enforced, common sense be damned.

Anyone who looks at a box of Cheerios and sees a product “intended for use in the prevention, mitigation and treatment of disease” is the type of person whose mortgage I’ll end up paying someday. So screw him. If he can’t distinguish between cereal and medication, then let him get ripped off for that $5 a week habit, I say. Consider it stimulus by stupidity.

After all, what’s good for General Mills is good for America.

20 April 2009 @ 7:40PM >> From a former police chief:

Over the past four years I’ve asked police officers throughout the U.S. (and in Canada) two questions. When’s the last time you had to fight someone under the influence of marijuana? (I’m talking marijuana only, not pot plus a six-pack or a fifth of tequila.) My colleagues pause, they reflect. Their eyes widen as they realize that in their five or fifteen or thirty years on the job they have never had to fight a marijuana user. I then ask: When’s the last time you had to fight a drunk? They look at their watches.

All of which begs the question. If one of these two drugs is implicated in dire health effects, high mortality rates, and physical violence—and the other is not—what are we to make of our nation’s marijuana laws? Or alcohol laws, for that matter.

Anybody out there want to launch a campaign for the re-prohibition of alcohol? Didn’t think so. The answer, of course, is responsible drinking. Marijuana smokers, for their part, have already shown (apart from that little matter known as the law) greater responsibility in their choice of drugs than those of us who choose alcohol.

14 April 2009 @ 9:11AM >> Smithsonian magazine reports why government intervention tends to go awry:

[H]umans have an inborn tolerance for risk-meaning that as safety features are added to vehicles and roads, drivers feel less vulnerable and tend to take more chances. The feeling of greater security tempts us to be more reckless. Behavioral scientists call it “risk compensation.”

[...]

[In 1975,] Sam Peltzman, a University of Chicago economist, published an analysis of federal auto-safety standards imposed in the late 1960s. Peltzman concluded that while the standards had saved the lives of some vehicle occupants, they had also led to the deaths of pedestrians, cyclists and other non-occupants. John Adams of University College London studied the impact of seat belts and reached a similar conclusion, which he published in 1981: there was no overall decrease in highway fatalities.

There has been a lively debate over risk compensation ever since, but today the issue is not whether it exists, but the degree to which it does. The phenomenon has been observed well beyond the highway-in the workplace, on the playing field, at home, in the air. Researchers have found that improved parachute rip cords did not reduce the number of sky-diving accidents; overconfident sky divers hit the silk too late. The number of flooding deaths in the United States has hardly changed in 100 years despite the construction of stronger levees in flood plains; people moved onto the flood plains, in part because of subsidized flood insurance and federal disaster relief. Studies suggest that workers who wear back-support belts try to lift heavier loads and that children who wear protective sports equipment engage in rougher play. Forest rangers say wilderness hikers take greater risks if they know that a trained rescue squad is on call. Public health officials cite evidence that enhanced HIV treatment can lead to riskier sexual behavior.

All of capitalism runs on risk, of course, and it may be in this arena that risk compensation has manifested itself most calamitously of late. William D. Cohan, author of House of Cards, a book about the fall of Bear Stearns, speaks for many when he observes that “Wall Street bankers took the risks they did because they got paid millions to do so and because they knew there would be few negative consequences for them personally if things failed to work out. In other words, the benefit of their risk-taking was all theirs and the consequences of their risk-taking would fall on the bank’s shareholders.” (Meanwhile investors, as James Surowiecki noted in a recent New Yorker column, tend to underestimate their chances of losing their shirts.) Late last year, 200 economists-including Sam Peltzman, who is now professor emeritus at Chicago-petitioned Congress not to pass its $700 billion plan to rescue the nation’s overextended banking system in order to preserve some balance between risk, reward and responsibility. Around the same time, columnist George Will pushed the leaders of the Big Three automakers into the same risk pool.

“Suppose that in 1979 the government had not engineered the first bailout of Chrysler,” Will wrote. “Might there have been a more sober approach to risk throughout corporate America?”

9 April 2009 @ 8:45AM >> Then, they came for the booze:

The cost of booze is going up. Whatever you’re used to paying for your favourite tipple, prepare to pay more. The days of cheap alcohol are numbered and, apparently, it is for our own good.

In wealthy nations all over the world, momentum is building for big hikes in the cost of alcohol. The rationale is to stop us all drinking to the point where we make other people’s lives hell by vandalising property, urinating and vomiting in the street, attacking people including members of our own family, and causing death and injury by driving under the influence. In other words, the goal is to stamp out what England’s Chief Medical Officer Liam Donaldson last week dubbed “passive drinking” - the damage done to innocent bystanders and society in general when people drink too much.

The passive drinking concept is borrowed from “passive smoking”. It is accepted almost everywhere that damage from passive smoking is real, and measures to curb it - taxing cigarettes heavily and banning smoking in public places, for example - have wide public support. Can a similar concept be applied to alcohol? And can the problem of passive drinking become as widely accepted as passive smoking, as hoped for by the World Health Organization, which last year began drafting a global plan to tackle alcohol abuse?

Tackling passive drinking will be an interesting experiment in social engineering. According to Donaldson, the way to do it is to raise the price of alcohol and limit its availability, however much resentment this may cause among the drinking classes. Donaldson proposed that the minimum price of a unit of alcohol (about as much as in half a pint of beer or a small glass of wine) should be raised to 50 pence.

Other countries are grasping the nettle too. The Scottish government is considering imposing a minimum price of 40 pence per unit of alcohol and banning cheap drink promotions such as two-for-one offers and “women drink free all night”. Last year, Australia slapped a hefty tax on alcopops in a bid to reduce heavy drinking among teenagers. And in North America there is much discussion about banning happy hours and similar promotions.

Look out, coffee—you’re next.

8 April 2009 @ 8:57AM >> New York City’s diminutive dictator of health habits extends his reach:

Suppose you wanted to test the effects of halving the amount of salt in people’s diets. If you were an academic researcher, you’d have to persuade your institutional review board that you had considered the risks and obtained informed consent from the participants.

You might, for instance, take note of a recent clinical trial in which heart patients put on a restricted-sodium diet fared worse than those on a normal diet. In light of new research suggesting that eating salt improves mood and combats depression, you might be alert for psychological effects of the new diet. You might worry that people would react to less-salty food by eating more of it, a trend you could monitor by comparing them with a control group.

But if you are the mayor of New York, no such constraints apply. You can simply announce, as Michael Bloomberg did, that the city is starting a “nationwide initiative” to pressure the food industry and restaurant chains to cut salt intake by half over the next decade. Why bother with consent forms when you can automatically enroll everyone in the experiment?

[...]

When Dr. Frieden and Mr. Bloomberg decided several years ago that trans fats were dangerous, they didn’t simply issue a warning or a set of voluntary guidelines. They insisted on outlawing trans fats in New York’s restaurants.

At the time, it seemed extraordinary for a city to be forbidding its diners to order a legal food product, particularly given the scientific uncertainties about trans fats and the possible harms resulting from the ban.

But that local restaurant policy now seems fairly modest by comparison with Mr. Bloomberg’s and Dr. Frieden’s plans for salt. Soon, wherever you live, wherever you eat, you could be part of their experiment.

In the America of today, there is no aspect of your life that falls outside the domain of government control.

9 January 2009 >> Paul Hsieh explains how socialized medicine will lead to the government control over virtually every aspect of your existence:

Imagine a country where the government regularly checks the waistlines of citizens over age 40. Anyone deemed too fat would be required to undergo diet counseling. Those who fail to lose sufficient weight could face further “reeducation” and their communities subject to stiff fines.

Is this some nightmarish dystopia?

No, this is contemporary Japan.

The Japanese government argues that it must regulate citizens’ lifestyles because it is paying their health costs. This highlights one of the greatly underappreciated dangers of “universal healthcare.” Any government that attempts to guarantee healthcare must also control its costs. The inevitable next step will be to seek to control citizens’ health and their behavior. Hence, Americans should beware that if we adopt universal healthcare, we also risk creating a “nanny state on steroids” antithetical to core American principles.

Other countries with universal healthcare are already restricting individual freedoms in the name of controlling health costs. For example, the British government has banned some television ads for eggs on the grounds that they were promoting an unhealthy lifestyle. This is a blatant infringement of egg sellers’ rights to advertise their products.

In 2007, New Zealand banned Richie Trezise, a Welsh submarine cable specialist, from entering the country on the grounds that his obesity would “impose significant costs ... on New Zealand’s health or special education services.” Richie later lost weight and was allowed to immigrate, but his wife had trouble slimming and was kept home. Germany has mounted an aggressive anti-obesity campaign in workplaces and schools to promote dieting and exercise. Citizens who fail to cooperate are branded as “antisocial” for costing the government billions of euros in medical expenses.

Of course healthy diet and exercise are good. But these are issues of personal - not government - responsibility. So long as they don’t harm others, adults should have the right to eat and drink what they wish - and the corresponding responsibility to enjoy (or suffer) the consequences of their choices. Anyone who makes poor lifestyle choices should pay the price himself or rely on voluntary charity, not demand that the government pay for his choices.

Government attempts to regulate individual lifestyles are based on the claim that they must limit medical costs that would otherwise be a burden on “society.” But this issue can arise only in “universal healthcare” systems where taxpayers must pay for everyone’s medical expenses.

Although American healthcare is only under partial government control in the form of programs such as Medicaid and Medicare, American nanny state regulations have exploded in recent years.

Many American cities ban restaurants from selling foods with trans fats. Los Angeles has imposed a moratorium on new fast food restaurants in South L.A. Other California cities ban smoking in some private residences. California has outlawed after-school bake sales as part of a “zero tolerance” ban on selling sugar products on campus. New York Gov. David Paterson has proposed an 18 percent tax on sugary sodas and juice drinks, and state officials have not ruled out additional taxes on cheeseburgers and other foods deemed unhealthy.

These ominous trends will only accelerate if the US adopts universal healthcare.

30 December 2008 @ 9:18AM >> An Australian government body will begin removing seashells from a beach because they make the beach too uncomfortable to walk on:

The committee, responsible for managing seven kilometres of coast stretching from Rye to Sorrento, has ordered oyster shells be cleared from Blairgowrie beach in time for the summer peak season.

But the decision has provoked criticism the committee is being overly protective and bureaucratic.

Kelvin Stingel, from the Whitecliffs to Camerons Bight Foreshore Committee of Management, said residents’ complaints about the “hazardous sharp” shells had prompted the volunteer body to act.

“We haven’t had any reports of people being injured but they said that they might get injured,” Mr Stingel said. “I walked across it myself and I wouldn’t let my kids run across it, it is pretty bad.”

[...]

“I think it’s ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous,” [Sorrento resident Dr. Keith Stead] said. “If they’re going to get rid of the shells I hope they’re not going to decide to get rid of the rocks and stones as well - it would just go on and on.”

Dr Stead said if parents were worried about their children they should teach them to be careful and wear sandals.

“I think we can probably do more harm to our kids by constantly trying to wrap them in the proverbial cotton wool and keep them from all danger and not have them recognise danger when they’re by themselves,” he said.

[...]

A long-standing Sorrento resident, who did not want to be named, said the decision was “misguided, far-fetched” and reminiscent of George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

“When I was a kid people were always cutting their feet on sea shells, you can’t control it,” she said. “It’s just another example of the nanny state where people no longer have to make their own decisions because they are looked after by a higher authority.”

23 November 2008 >> New York City’s ridiculous Nanny State marches on:

City officials have ordered 22 New York churches to stop providing beds to homeless people.

With temperatures well below freezing early Saturday, the churches must obey a city rule requiring faith-based shelters to be open at least five days a week — or not at all.

Arnold Cohen, president of the Partnership for the Homeless, a nonprofit that serves as a link with the city, said he had to tell the churches they no longer qualify.

He said hundreds of people now won’t have a place to sleep.

The Department of Homeless Services said the city offers other shelters with the capacity to accept all those who have been sleeping in the churches. The city had 8,000 beds waiting.

Sure, the city can take them in, but maybe some of the homeless prefer the church-provided beds to the city shelters, even if they’re only available a few nights a week.

I’ve been in many city government buildings, and I’ve yet to find one I’d feel comfortable taking a 5-minute nap in, much less sleeping through the night.

And although I can’t say I’ve spent the night in a city-run homeless shelter, I find it hard to believe that any of them are an improvement over the other esteemed edificies maintained by the City of New York.

If the churches are willing to provide the beds and some homeless are opting for them over the city’s shelters, why impose an arbitrary rule to deny one more option to people who already have so few?

14 November 2008 @ 7:53AM >> In the 1990s, the voters of New York City twice approved term limits for mayor and city council members.

But recently, at the behest of the city’s Nanny-in-Chief, Mayor Michael Bloomberg—the guy who wants to put a toll on the Brooklyn Bridge (and every other road into and out of Manhattan) and charge supermarket shoppers 5 cents per plastic bag—the New York City Council overrode the will of the voters and repealed term limits, allowing Bloomberg to run for a third term.

It seems that Bloomberg’s damn-the-voters lesson was learned by KGB-man Vladimir Putin:

Russia’s parliament is rushing through plans to extend the presidential term from four years to six, leading to speculation that Vladimir Putin plans a dramatic return to the Kremlin.

A constitutional amendment is to be fast-tracked through the Duma, the lower house of parliament, which will vote tomorrow on all three readings of the Bill. Deputies usually take weeks to consider legislation over three readings before passing it into law.

[...]

An unnamed Kremlin adviser was quoted in Vedomosti, a daily business newspaper, last week as saying that the reform was intended to restore Mr Putin to the presidency as early as next year. He became Prime Minister after selecting Mr Medvedev to be his successor in elections in March.

Under such a scheme Mr Medvedev, 43, would enact the amendment and some unpopular social reforms. He would then resign and call a snap election in 2009 to make way for his mentor to return.

Mr Putin, 56, would govern for two more terms of six years each, until 2021, allowing him to fulfil the Putin Plan for the social and economic development of Russia.

Mr Putin fanned the belief that he is preparing for a comeback as president by pointedly refusing to state who would be the first to benefit from a longer term.

“I support Dimitri Medvedev’s proposal. As regards to who can run for the next term and when, it is premature to talk about this,” he said after a meeting with Matti Vanhanen, the Finnish Prime Minister.

He added: “We are looking for instruments which would allow us to guarantee sovereignty, to implement our long-term plans . . . and assist the development of democratic processes in the country.”

[...]

By engineering his return to the Kremlin, however, Mr Putin will strengthen criticism that Russia is sliding into dictatorship.

12 October 2008 @ 10:38AM >> Switzerland does its part to ensure that Europe jumps the shark:

For years, Swiss scientists have blithely created genetically modified rice, corn and apples. But did they ever stop to consider just how humiliating such experiments may be to plants?

That’s a question they must now ask. Last spring, this small Alpine nation began mandating that geneticists conduct their research without trampling on a plant’s dignity.

“Unfortunately, we have to take it seriously,” Beat Keller, a molecular biologist at the University of Zurich. “It’s one more constraint on doing genetic research.”

Dr. Keller recently sought government permission to do a field trial of genetically modified wheat that has been bred to resist a fungus. He first had to debate the finer points of plant dignity with university ethicists. Then, in a written application to the government, he tried to explain why the planned trial wouldn’t “disturb the vital functions or lifestyle” of the plants. He eventually got the green light.

The rule, based on a constitutional amendment, came into being after the Swiss Parliament asked a panel of philosophers, lawyers, geneticists and theologians to establish the meaning of flora’s dignity.

“We couldn’t start laughing and tell the government we’re not going to do anything about it,” says Markus Schefer, a member of the ethics panel and a professor of law at the University of Basel. “The constitution requires it.”

[...]

Several years ago, when Christof Sautter, a botanist at Switzerland’s Federal Institute of Technology, failed to get permission to do a local field trial on transgenic wheat, he moved the experiment to the U.S. He’s too embarrassed to mention the new dignity rule to his American colleagues. “They’ll think Swiss people are crazy,” he says.

10 October 2008 >> Insanity prevails in Great Britain:

A gardener who fenced off his allotment with barbed wire after being targeted by thieves has been ordered to take it down - in case intruders scratch themselves.

Bill Malcolm erected the 3ft fence after thieves struck three times in just four months, stealing tools worth around £300 from his shed and ransacking his vegetable patch.

[...]

Mr Malcolm, who has grown potatoes, onions, beetroot and asparagus on two patches at the Round Hill allotments in Marlbrook, Worcestershire, for the past eight years, said: ‘It’s an absolutely ridiculous situation.

‘All I wanted was to protect my property but the wire had to go in case a thief scratched himself.

[...]

‘They shouldn’t be trespassing in the first place but the council apologised and said they didn’t want to be sued by a wounded thief.

‘I told them to let the thief sue me so at least that way I would know who was breaking into my allotment but everything I said fell on deaf ears. It seems as though they are so wrapped up in red tape, they are unable to help me.’

[...]

Mr Malcolm’s plight comes just weeks after Bristol council angered allotment holders by urging them not to lock their sheds in case burglars damaged them breaking in.

8 September 2008 @ 8:52AM >> Sex doesn’t sell, at least not in Europe:

[Members of European Parliament] want TV regulators in the EU to set guidelines which would see the end of anything deemed to portray women as sex objects or reinforce gender stereotypes.

This could potentially mean an end to attractive women advertising perfume, housewives in the kitchen or men doing DIY.

Such classic adverts as the Diet Coke commercial featuring the bare-chested builder, or Wonderbra’s “Hello Boys” featuring model Eva Herzigova would have been banned.

The new rules come in a report by the EU’s women’s rights committee.
Swedish MEP Eva-Britt Svensson urged Britain and other members to use existing equality, sexism and discrimination laws to control advertising.

She wants regulatory bodies set up to monitor ads and introduce a “zero-tolerance” policy against “sexist insults or degrading images”.

18 August 2008 @ 8:07AM >> Chandler Tuttle, who did some great editing work on Indoctrinate U, is coming out with a film of his own.

2081 is his soon-to-be-released short film adapted from the Kurt Vonnegut story Harrison Bergeron. The film is set in a future society where everyone is finally equal. People who excel in any area are deliberately handicapped by the government in order to enforce equality. People with above-average strength are shackled to weights to prevent their strength from being an unfair advantage. Those deemed too intelligent must wear earpieces that emit loud crackles and noises to stifle coherent thinking.

In other words, the world has finally become the egalitarian “utopia” that today’s social engineers desire.

You can see the trailer for 2081 at the film’s website, finallyequal.com.

20 May 2008 @ 8:52AM >> In yesterday’s, “The Coming Nanny State Fat Camp,” I mentioned two excuses Nanny Statists will use to get government to restrict people’s food intake and force them to exercise.

If this comment is any clue, those Nanny Statists have a friend in Barack Obama:

“We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK,” Obama said.

“That’s not leadership. That’s not going to happen,” he added.

Millions around the globe have starved to death in recent years thanks to petty dictators and corrupt governments. But to Senator Obama, “leadership” means letting the rest of the world know that he blames the United States first.

America exports more food that any other nation on Earth, yet accounts for less than 5% of the world’s population.

When it comes to our net contribution to the world’s food supply, we are not the planet’s biggest problem.

But rather than implore, say, North Korea to abandon the bankrupt ideology that’s led to numerous mass starvations, a President Obama would prefer to subject the food intake of our private citizens to the approval of other countries.

Now that the senator seems to be preening for the job of Counselor-in-Chief of the Nanny State Fat Camp, his wife’s odd comments from earlier in the year suddenly make more sense:

Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.

19 May 2008 @ 7:56AM >> One way in which the Nanny State will gain power to control more of your lives is through government health-care coverage.

If obesity causes higher health-care costs, and if the government finances health-care coverage, then people will begin to argue that—to keep government expenditures down—obese people should be forced to exercise more, change their food intake, or otherwise lose their coverage.

It’s one of the reasons that Nanny Statists love the concept of a government-controlled medical system; it’s a sneaky way of vastly increasing the power of the Nanny State.

The hysteria over global warming may give Nanny Statists another excuse to control our lives:

[I]n a letter published Friday in the medical journal Lancet, two scientists write that obese people are disproportionately responsible for high food prices and greenhouse gas emissions because they consume 18% more food energy due to their greater body mass — and require increased quantities of fuel to transport themselves and the food they eat. “Promotion of a normal distribution of BMI would reduce the global demand for, and thus the price of, food,” write the authors[.]

1 May 2008 >> Get ready to start surrendering more of your rights to government. You knew the Nannycrats wouldn’t stop at smoking, fast food and foie gras. Now they’ve got their crosshairs zeroed in on that modern-day horror, the thing most of us dread and fear... you guessed it...

Plastic bags:

[Baltimore City Councilman James Kraft] equated using plastic bags with Nazi extermination tactics at a City Council meeting earlier this week.

“We don’t want to be criticized by future generations for not doing enough now as were those who dealt with the Germans then,” Kraft said.

So what follows? Should those who use plastic bags be charged with murder? Genocide?

No one can claim plastic bags help the environment. But he hurts his cause by outsizing their danger by orders of magnitude - especially when similar plans have failed throughout the rest of [Maryland].

Bills in both Anne Arundel County and the state legislature failed to make it into law in the past year. And studies show plastic bags are cheaper and require less energy to make than paper bags.

They are also much less environmentally-unfriendly than people like Councilman Kraft believe, according to the London Times:

Scientists and environmentalists have attacked a global campaign to ban plastic bags which they say is based on flawed science and exaggerated claims.

The widely stated accusation that the bags kill 100,000 animals and a million seabirds every year are false, experts have told The Times. They pose only a minimal threat to most marine species, including seals, whales, dolphins and seabirds.

[...]

Campaigners say that plastic bags pollute coastlines and waterways, killing or injuring birds and livestock on land and, in the oceans, destroying vast numbers of seabirds, seals, turtles and whales. However, The Times has established that there is no scientific evidence to show that the bags pose any direct threat to marine mammals.

They “don’t figure” in the majority of cases where animals die from marine debris, said David Laist, the author of a seminal 1997 study on the subject. Most deaths were caused when creatures became caught up in waste produce. “Plastic bags don’t figure in entanglement,” he said. “The main culprits are fishing gear, ropes, lines and strapping bands. Most mammals are too big to get caught up in a plastic bag.”

[...]

The central claim of campaigners is that the bags kill more than 100,000 marine mammals and one million seabirds every year. However, this figure is based on a misinterpretation of a 1987 Canadian study in Newfoundland, which found that, between 1981 and 1984, more than 100,000 marine mammals, including birds, were killed by discarded nets. The Canadian study did not mention plastic bags.

Fifteen years later in 2002, when the Australian Government commissioned a report into the effects of plastic bags, its authors misquoted the Newfoundland study, mistakenly attributing the deaths to “plastic bags”.

The figure was latched on to by conservationists as proof that the bags were killers. For four years the “typo” remained uncorrected. It was only in 2006 that the authors altered the report, replacing “plastic bags” with “plastic debris”.

Oops.

Nevertheless, knowledge of this error will not quell the Nannies’ desires to meddle more.

Bored people seeking the tingle of power are drawn to becoming Nannies because they get to feel morally superior while also controlling the behavior of others. It’s a win-win.

So I predict, the campaign against plastic bags will continue.

5 November 2007 @ 10:04AM >> Cigarettes, trans-fats, aluminum baseball bats, and now bottled water. Is this the latest frontier in political correctness? Drink up now while you still can...it won’t be long before Michael Bloomberg tries to outlaw it.

18 April 2007 >> New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine suffered severe injury in a car accident last week, and I wish him the quickest, most pain-free recovery possible. I feel for the friends and relatives forced to watch him suffer through his treatments as the doctors try to repair the damage. A car accident of that magnitude is a horrific trauma for anyone to go through, much less someone who must do so while under the media’s microscope.

It’s a bit crass to use a human tragedy to make a political point. But I’ve noticed no commentators mentioning the Obvious Unsaid of this case. Corzine, who governs a state with a seatbelt law and a strictly-enforced speed limit, disobeyed both. Plenty of us violate traffic laws, so I’m not criticizing Corzine for that.

When we have laws that regulate every minor detail of our lives, we break them. That’s not shocking. But having such laws in the first place corrodes the authority of all laws by encouraging disrespect for the law in general. If we assume that most people break minor laws, can we assume they will always obey major laws? And if we have a legal system that encourages us to distinguish between the laws we’re allowed to break and those we’re not, doesn’t that leave a lot of room for untrustworthy people to interpret things in a way we’d rather they didn’t?

The problem isn’t that Corzine was in a car going 91 miles an hour, it’s that the car was being driven by a member of the very police force that penalizes his state’s citizens for doing the exact same thing. And in a car going at that speed, the officer driving the car allowed Corzine to ride without a seatbelt after his state announced a “click it or ticket” crackdown on seatbelt scofflaws.

Again, I am not criticizing Governor Corzine for doing something that most of us also do at times. If he wants to drive around like that, then my biggest hope for him is that he gets home safely.

My problem is not with the governor or his actions, it’s with the Nanny State mentality that politicians like Corzine, Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Spitzer promote. Once we start giving government the power to regulate the manner in which we conduct one part of our personal lives, it becomes much easier for the next politician to argue that people should also support banning his pet irritant.

We’re already seeing that happen. First it was smoking, then it was foie gras, soft drinks, trans-fats, incandescent lightbulbs and aluminum baseball bats. The list of things politicians want to ban is growing at an alarming rate, and nothing seems to be standing in the way.

We don’t live under prohibition anymore, but the mentality that spawned it is alive and well. Today, it’s a prohibition on the margins of life, a prohibition of a thousand cuts. And for each new flag planted by the Nanny Staters, it becomes ever easier to seize additional territory.

And to add insult to injury, the people who set these rules always seem to avoid them.

That’s how we end up with politicians like Al Gore and John Edwards scolding middle-class Americans for their energy use while they occupy energy-guzzling mansions with multi-car garages that dwarf my apartment.

Hey, if they earned it, they deserve it. I won’t begrudge them their palaces if they’re willing to pay for them. But it would be nice if they took a break from acting like the enlightened ones who are going to save the world by telling everyone else how to live.

Oh, and one other thing...they can pry my incandescent bulbs from my cold dead fingers.

7 February 2007 @ 9:02AM >> Democrats love to talk about our supposed lost freedoms in the wake of September 11th. But they have no problem trying to regulate the most mundane details of our day-to-day lives. In California, a Democrat-sponsored bill would outlaw incandescent lights and force everyone to live in homes with doctor’s office lighting. And now, a New York Democrat is trying to make it illegal to cross a street while listening to music or talking on the phone.

Add that to the growing list of other ways the nanny-politicians want to regulate our lives (banning the use of trans-fats in restaurants, removing foie gras from the menu, outlawing smoking in your home and your car, etc., etc.), and it’s pretty clear where our freedoms are really being lost.

But if you think about it, we should really be grateful. We’re too stupid to make these decisions on our own. We might hurt ourselves. Or someone else. Or maybe even a poor, defenseless goose. Thankfully, we have the crushing embrace of the nanny state to protect us from the horrors of the world.

The question is, does all this really go far enough? Why waste years and years making incremental changes? Think of all the people who might get hurt in the meantime. We need something comprehensive, something that’ll start saving lives today.

In that spirit, I propose the Universal Safety Act (USA). It’s a very simple three-step plan to ensure that everything is always safe. All corners must be rounded, all objects must be encased in rubberized protectant, and all citizens must wear head-to-toe suits made out of bubble wrap.

So, support the USA, and do it for the children: us.