Month: October 2010

“Lifestyle Choice”

Those are the words Obama aide Valerie Jarrett uses to describe one of the recent gay suicide victims. "Lifestyle choice." Yes, the Obamaites mean well, even if they've done so little. But they really are completely clueless, utterly tone-deaf, and completely out to lunch on gay issues, aren't they? Lifestyle choice? A 15 year old boy is gay, and has a sexual orientation, not a "lifestyle choice," for Pete's sake. What's next: sexual preference?

A Child Psychiatrist’s Fears, Ctd

A reader writes:

One reason alcohol is so much harder to come by for teenagers – despite its greater public availability in supermarkets and convenience stores – is its sheer size.  While you can stuff enough pot in your pocket to get a roomful of teenagers stoned, this simply isn't true with alcohol (especially beer).  What this means is that the high school dealer is unlikely to go away if pot is legalized, and that with all the fancy new varieties increasingly available as a result of legalization, he may well be dealing in much more powerful stuff than I could ever hope to get my hands on when I was in high school.

The child psychiatrist writes:

I should say that the responders are probably right; legalization won't necessarily lead to more teenagers having access to pot, and may very well mean that fewer use it. It was hyperbole to write that. Here's a link to a nice little summary on the (largely unknown but trending positive) effects of decriminalization that some hard-working legislative aide in Connecticut put together.

When Common Sense Fails

Alex Tabbarok targets systemic economic biases:

Bill Goffe recently (2009) surveyed one of his macro principles classes and found … that the median student believes that 35% of workers earn the minimum wage and a substantial fraction think that a majority of workers earn the minimum wage (Actual rate in 2007: 2.3% of hourly-paid workers and a smaller share of all workers earn the minimum wage, rates are probably somewhat higher today since the min. wage has risen and wages have not).

When asked about profits as a percentage of sales the median student guessed 30% (actual rate, closer to 4%).

When asked about the inflation rate over the last year (survey was in 2009) the median student guessed 11%.  Actual rate: much closer to 0%.  Note, how important such misconceptions could be to policy.

When asked by how much has income per person in the United States changed since 1950 (after adjusting for inflation) the median student said an increase of 25%.  Actual rate an increase of about 248%, thus the median student was off by a factor of 10.

 

The Dish At Ten: Matt Yglesias

Yglesias's contribution:

I know this has a bit of an air of “village” circle jerk to it, but I think [Andrew's] very un-village integrity is underscored by the fact that literally the first time I met him was over lunch when he was recruiting me to join the Atlantic. Part of the essence of village dysfunction is that it’s extremely unusual to get assistance in moving up the professional ladder from someone who you’re not tied into through some kind of crony network and the world would be a better place if more people had his kind of approach to such matters.

The Odd Lies Of Sarah Palin XCVI: Giving Birth Two Weeks After Announcing Her Pregnancy

Well, we thought we had it straight, however bizarre. But Palin will not let the Trig story alone and is now bragging about one of its stranger details:

"I didn't tell anybody for a long time. In fact, I think I probably had the world record. I went seven months without telling anybody I was pregnant, except for Todd, our doctor and a nurse. And matter of fact to this day if I didn't tell anybody … up there in Alaska, it's so cold you just put on more layers, more clothes, and here I am chunking out and my staff is like "Governor, are you really that cold? Do you really want another coat?" "Yes it's chilly in here." But to this day, because my son Trig was born prematurely at seven and a half months and I didn't tell anyone I was pregnant for seven months, to this day, a lot of the haters, a lot of the bloggers out here, still say "'That couldn't have been her kid, because she was only pregnant for two weeks!' And I say, don't make me show you the stretch marks to prove it!"

Yes, please, don't show us. Just a medical record will do. And, by the way, the first person to make this kind of joke was not a "hater" but Palin herself in the New York Times:

At her baby shower, Ms. Palin joked about her months of secrecy, Ms. Lane said. “About the seventh month I thought I’d better let people know,” Ms. Palin said.

“So it was really great,” she continued. “I was only pregnant a month.”

Hence the new odd lie. She now says above that she announced she was pregnant at seven months and gave birth at seven and a half. But that is verifiably untrue in the public record. Palin told the world she was pregnant – to universal disbelief – on March 6, 2008. Trig Palin was born on April 18, 2008. That's six weeks, not two. The story has changed before as well. She gave birth in Wasilla, but recently said it was in Anchorage. You'll also notice that she says she hid her pregnancy under coats and clothes and layers even indoors, blaming the cold. In her original telling of the story, she said she thought her staff had already suspected the truth because they could see her clothes getting tighter and tighter. From the Anchorage Daily News at the time:

"I thought it was becoming obvious," Palin said. "You know, clothes getting snugger and snugger."

Now all of this could be explained – as with everything else – by Palin's generally cavalier attitude toward reality. In fact, that's the likeliest explanation. Every time she tells the story, it gets embellished a little, or changed by bad memory, or just because it has become a schtick. But would it be beyond a reporter to ask her to explain the increasing discrepancies in a story that she keeps telling in stump speeches across the country? And could I really go an anniversary week without a Trig relapse?

The Dutch Model Fails?

MarijuanaChristopherFurlongGettyImages

With looming reforms rolling back pot-tolerance in Amsterdam, Yglesias looks at the state of marijuana in the Netherlands:

[A]s I understand it there are two main problems with the status quo. One is that under the old tolerance regime there’s still no way for a coffee shop to legally obtain the supply of marijuana you need to operate on the scale of a business. Consequently, de facto legalization hasn’t actually eliminated the black market and associated criminality.

Secondarily, the main market for the coffee shops turns out to be drug tourists from abroad. That reduces the Dutch political constituency for keeping them open. And the two factors interact together to create a situation where there’s a strong case to be made that legal coffee shops (by bringing drug tourists from the UK and the US into shops that need to tap an illegal wholesale market to gain their supplies) increase the scale of organized crime in the Netherlands.

I think that if you’re looking for stable alternatives to prohibition you either need to more to a more robust form of legalization than the Dutch had—complete with totally legitimate marijuana farmers—or else adopt the Mark Kleiman “grow your own” proposal in which growing pot, smoking pot, possessing pot, etc are all legal but commerce in marijuana would be illegal. 

That seems to me to get it right. Drug tourism, especially, I'm sorry to say, by the Brits on weekend shroom benders, has led to some awful incidents, and I can see the logic of restricting pot use to Dutch residents. You cannot kinda-legalize something now illegal and hope for the best. Getting to there from here requires grasping the, er, bud.

(Image: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)