Category: Nanny State

“What Can We Get Away With?”

Thursday, January 26th, 2012

I eagerly await an FTC investigation.

Mayor Bloomberg’s New York City health department has come in for repeated criticism in this space and elsewhere for crusading against salty and fattening foods through ad campaigns that manipulate viewer reactions in ways that border on the misleading and deceptive (“What can we get away with?” famously asked one official). They’re at it again. On January 9, Gotham’s for-your-own-good crew unveiled a new ad warning “Portions have grown. So has Type 2 diabetes, which can lead to amputations,” dramatically illustrated with a photo of an obese man with a stump where his leg had been. But as the New York Times reports, city officials “did not let on that the man shown — whose photo came from a company that supplies stock images to advertising firms and others — was not an amputee and may not have had diabetes.” Instead, they just Photoshopped his leg off, which certainly got the effect they were looking for, albeit at the cost of photographic reality.

Reductio Creep

Friday, January 20th, 2012

Back when the smoking bans were spreading across the country, those of us opposed to them made the point that you could make many of the same arguments about perfume and cologne that ban proponents were making about second hand smoke. (And there’s about as much evidence that fragrances are a health risk, which is to say very little.)

But you can’t really make a reductio argument for too long before someone embraces it.

Many women love wearing perfume, but have you ever gotten a headache from someone who has sprayed on way too much of a scent you don’t like? Back in 2008, Susan McBride, sued Detroit under the Americans with Disabilities Act, claiming a co-worker’s fragrance made it hard for her to breathe and do her job. She was eventually awarded $100,000, and the city warned workers to avoid using scented products like perfume, cologne, deodorant, lotion, and aftershave. Now New Hampshire is looking to do the same.

State representative Michele Peckham is sponsoring House Bill 1444 which hopes to ban state employees who work with the public from wearing perfume. Apparently a constituent with extreme allergies approached Peckham with the proposal. “It may seem silly, but it’s a health issue,” Peckham told the Union Leader. “Many people have violent reactions to strong scents.”

The author then poses an honest question that puts this nonsense into the proper perspective:

Allergies and annoyances aside, should the government be able to regulate what we smell like?

The bans at the moment are just for state employees. But that’s merely where these ideas start. Just to hammer the point home, this, from  a tweet from Stacy Malkan, head of an organization called the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics.

Fragrance is the new secondhand smoke.

Of course, body odor is fairly offensive to the senses as well. Don’t we deserve protection from that? Clearly the proper balance here is for the federal government to require regular showers and the application of deodorant, but ban all but the unscented varieties. All of this would be proper under the authority  of the Commerce Clause, of course.

Morning Links

Friday, January 20th, 2012

Morning Links

Wednesday, January 4th, 2012

Morning Links

Thursday, December 29th, 2011

Extra Afternoontime Links

Wednesday, December 28th, 2011
  • My Huffington Post colleague Ryan Grim on how Ron Paul has been one of few politicians to talk about the racist origins of the drug war.
  • Popehat is asking you to vote for the “Censorious Asshat of the Year.” So many nominees, so devoted to their cause.
  • Sen. Chuck Schumer assails new caffeine product before it comes to market.
  • L.A. County Sheriff’s Department has jailed hundreds of innocent people due to misidentification.
  • When Obama was sworn into office in 2009, the nation’s clandestine drone war was confined to a single country, Pakistan, where 44 strikes over five years had left about 400 people dead . . . The number of strikes has since soared to nearly 240, and the number of those killed, according to conservative estimates, has more than quadrupled.” These are estimates, because the government won’t say how many innocent people its drones have killed.
  • Federal worker pay saw lowest increase in 10 years last year, but even with the Obama “freeze,”  it was still more than the increase in the private sector. According to USA Today, one in five federal employees now makes over $100,000 per year. The recession isn’t exactly crippling members of Congress, either.
  • Comedienne-turned-conservative-activist Victoria Jackson serves up a hot plate of crazyburgers.
  • Headline of the day.
  • New York Times attempts to paint conceal carry permit owners as crazy gun nuts with an itchy trigger finger, accidentally publishes data suggesting they’re  far less likely to commit crimes than the general population, but runs with the narrative anyway.

Morning Links

Wednesday, December 28th, 2011
  • Not The Onion: Californians will vote on whether porn stars should be required to wear condoms.
  • It’s all just going to get dumber and dumber until November.
  • Gene Healy: the five worst op-eds of 2011. His delightfully Friedmanesque closer: “And so, my friends, we roll up our sleeves and limp forward, hunkered down to face what 2012 holds, our boats borne back ceaselessly into the past, yet always, always, twirling toward freedom.”
  • Alternet publishes article calling for government monitoring of doctors and their pain patients, a crackdown on prescription painkillers, and generally expanding the drug war, all because . . . corporations are evil. And Florida’s governor loves the Tea Party. Or something.
  • A list of all the new reasons for which governments will send you to jail, starting on Sunday.
  • Woman says she was arrested, had her phone confiscated after trying to record a police beating in North Carolina.

Morning Links

Friday, December 23rd, 2011

Saturday Links

Saturday, December 10th, 2011

Saturday Links

Saturday, December 3rd, 2011

Well Played, McDonalds

Wednesday, November 30th, 2011

The restaurant chain executes a brilliant little maneuver to get around San Francisco’s ridiculous attempt to ban the toys in Happy Meals.

Nose-thumbing at absurd regulations makes me smile.

Morning Links

Tuesday, November 29th, 2011

When Paternalism Kills

Wednesday, November 16th, 2011

The New York Times looks at the e-cigarette debate:

A team led by Riccardo Polosa of the University of Catania recruited 40 hard-core smokers — ones who had turned down a free spot in a smoking-cessation program — and simply gave them a gadget already available in stores for $50. This electronic cigarette, or e-cigarette, contains a small reservoir of liquid nicotine solution that is vaporized to form an aerosol mist.

The user “vapes,” or puffs on the vapor, to get a hit of the addictive nicotine (and the familiar sensation of bringing a cigarette to one’s mouth) without the noxious substances found in cigarette smoke.

After six months, more than half the subjects in Dr. Polosa’s experiment had cut their regular cigarette consumption by at least 50 percent. Nearly a quarter had stopped altogether. Though this was just a small pilot study, the results fit with other encouraging evidence and bolster hopes that these e-cigarettes could be the most effective tool yet for reducing the global death toll from smoking.

Good news. But wait . . .

But there’s a powerful group working against this innovation — and it’s not Big Tobacco. It’s a coalition of government officials and antismoking groups who have been warning about the dangers of e-cigarettes and trying to ban their sale.

The controversy is part of a long-running philosophical debate about public health policy, but with an odd role reversal. In the past, conservatives have leaned toward “abstinence only” policies for dealing with problems like teenage pregnancy and heroin addiction, while liberals have been open to “harm reduction” strategies like encouraging birth control and dispensing methadone.

When it comes to nicotine, though, the abstinence forces tend to be more liberal, including Democratic officials at the state and national level who have been trying to stop the sale of e-cigarettes and ban their use in smoke-free places. They’ve argued that smokers who want an alternative source of nicotine should use only thoroughly tested products like Nicorette gum and prescription patches — and use them only briefly, as a way to get off nicotine altogether.

The article points out that the FDA has warned that there are traces of harmful and possibly toxic substances in e-cigarette vapor, but . . .

…the agency has never presented evidence that the trace amounts actually cause any harm, and it has neglected to mention that similar traces of these chemicals have been found in other F.D.A.-approved products, including nicotine patches and gum. The agency’s methodology and warnings have been lambasted in scientific journals by Dr. Polosa and other researchers, including Brad Rodu, a professor of medicine at the University of Louisville in Kentucky.

Writing in Harm Reduction Journal this year, Dr. Rodu concludes that the F.D.A.’s results “are highly unlikely to have any possible significance to users” because it detected chemicals at “about one million times lower concentrations than are conceivably related to human health.” His conclusion is shared by Michael Siegel, a professor at the Boston University School of Public Health.

“It boggles my mind why there is a bias against e-cigarettes among antismoking groups,” Dr. Siegel said. He added that it made no sense to fret about hypothetical risks from minuscule levels of several chemicals in e-cigarettes when the alternative is known to be deadly: cigarettes containing thousands of chemicals, including dozens of carcinogens and hundreds of toxins.

The analogy to abstinence-only sex education is spot-on. And it’s more evidence that the public health fanatics on the left can be just as ideology-driven and anti-science as the moral crusaders on the right. Of course if you’ve been following the medical marijuana debate, it shouldn’t be all that surprising that the FDA would let politics and fearmongering trump science. And on that issue, left and right are guilty.

Morning Links

Monday, November 14th, 2011

Morning Links

Thursday, November 10th, 2011

Morning Links

Monday, October 31st, 2011

Morning Links

Tuesday, October 18th, 2011

Sunday Links

Sunday, October 16th, 2011

Morning Links

Wednesday, October 5th, 2011

Afternoon Links

Tuesday, October 4th, 2011

Saturday Links

Saturday, September 24th, 2011

Morning Links

Friday, September 23rd, 2011

Morning Links

Thursday, September 22nd, 2011

Morning Links

Tuesday, September 20th, 2011
  • The war on e-cigarettes. I’ve written this before, but because e-cigarettes are harmless, and because they can help people quit actual cigarettes, these attempts to prohibit them are an excellent example of paternalistic regulations that actually kill people.
  • Connecticut Supreme Court justice apologizes to Suzette Kelo for ruling against her.
  • Given the numerous times a story I first reported was re-reported by a bigger news outlet without credit (something that also happens pretty frequently to other bloggers, and especially to alt weeklies), I find it kind of amusing that reporters at larger news outlets are now complaining when it happens to them.
  • L.A. Times: Here are two statistics that have nothing to do with one another. But we’re going to juxtapose them anyway.
  • David Rittgers: Abolish the Department of Homeland Security.
  • Man gets life sentence for shoplifting.
  • New Jersey cop attacks woman who was filming him at a DWI checkpoint.

Morning Links

Thursday, September 15th, 2011