Year: 2013

Can We Tax Our Vices Away?

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Despite a recent study (paywalled) showing that adding a 20% tax to sugar-sweetened beverages "would translate into an average weight loss of 1.6 pounds during the first year and a cumulated weight loss of 2.9 pounds in the long run," Aaron Carroll remains skeptical:

[W]e can debate how valuable 3 pounds of weight loss is. We can also debate as to whether a 20% tax is politically feasible. But at least it appears that a tax might produce some results. Fighting obesity is so difficult that sometimes I despair that anything would work. I also appreciate the addition of evidence to this debate. But if you’re asking my opinion, I think that any implementable tax would likely not yield results that would make a difference in the real world. We need a holistic solution. Keep working.

Relatedly, Kleiman suggests raising taxes on alcohol:

Doubling the federal alcohol tax from the current ten cents per drink to twenty cents would reduce homicide and automobile fatalities about about 7% each, saving about 3000 lives per year. It would cost a two-drinks-per-day drinker (at about the 80th percentile of all drinkers about $6 per month. (Fully internalizing the external costs of drinking would involve taxes nearer a dollar a drink.)

My own immediate free association is Britain, where vice taxes are ginormous and almost everyone is, by American standards, an alcoholic.

(Photo: some victims of Oktoberfest by Getty Images.)

A Definition Of Torture, Ctd

A reader quotes me:

Torture is defined as breaking someone in order to get information. Cheney's torture program bragged of "breaking" people. John Yoo even bragged of crushing a child's testicles if necessary – which would, in his view, be perfectly legal for a president to authorize. The minute you apply mental and physical suffering sufficiently severe to force someone to "break", it's torture.

While I certainly am opposed to crushing a child's testicles, this definition is far too broad. Virtually all police interrogation is defined as torture in this case. Making a suspect sit in a room for a couple hours is "torture" if they can't handle it and give up the information according to this. ANYTHING is torture if the suspect doesn't like dealing with it and subsequently gives away information they didn't want to give (which is what "breaking" means). In other words, based on this definition, simply arresting someone and asking them if they committed the crime can be considered torture if, I don't know, the handcuffs kinda hurt and the threat of prison rape sufficiently disturbed them mentally so they revealed information. So merely "breaking" someone isn't torture. It's not that simple.

C'mon. The legal definition – as if the law matters any more on this subject – is the following:

(1) “torture” means an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control;

(2) “severe mental pain or suffering” means the prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from— (A) the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering; (B) the administration or application, or threatened administration or application, of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality; (C) the threat of imminent death; or (D) the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering, or the administration or application of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or personality; and

(3) “United States” means the several States of the United States, the District of Columbia, and the commonwealths, territories, and possessions of the United States.

From a review of Central Park Five (trailer above):

We now know the kids [falsely convicted of gang rape] were subjected to 14-30 hours of stressful police interrogations complete with shouts, verbal threats and physical abuse that amounted to psychological torture.

"There was no food, no drink, no sleep and I didn't know when it was going to end."  Eventually the cops told the terrified, exhausted boys: "Your friends have all confessed and named you." It was a lie but it had the desired effect. "I figured: they did it to me; I'll do it to them." "I made stuff up." Told they would be allowed to go home if they "told the truth," the boys struggled to make up stories. When their descriptions didn't match reality, the cops coached them to change their stories to be more "believable."

Turning away from the camera and cringing at the sexually explicit details of his "confession," one of the Five tells Burns: "A 14-year-old boy doesn't talk like this. I was crying. [The cop] said: 'Don't worry. You did good. Everything's gonna be alright. I said it 'cause they told me to so I could go home." 

The Flu Feedback Loop

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Michael Byrne ponders it:

[W]hile it's true that a whole lot of people have a flu and we may be facing an epidemic in which people die, all of that is magnified in a pretty new, interesting way. Search-based data faces the likelihood of being skewed by a feedback loop of sorts, with the map itself (and other media) increasing search queries for flu (even among non-sick users) and, in turn, reddening the map more, particularly if the current explosion of internet-based medicine continues apace.

I slept 13 hours last night, sweating through a few t-shirts and boxers, coughing up what looked like dark gray phlegm (mmmm), and basically attached to every inhaler I have. This is serious, guys. I had the shot and may have gotten off easy (although I wouldn't call the last two weeks of misery easy). Get your shot ASAP. And get off the Internet flu searches. You're making it look even worse.

(Above: Flu map from Google. Orange = high flu activity. Red = intense flu activity.)

Paying For Torture

Ten years after the fact, L-3 Services, the American defense contractor on site at Abu Ghraib, is paying $5 million to 71 former detainees. Robert Beckhusen provides background:

Until the settlement, the only response to torture and abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison was the military’s criminal convictions of 11 former soldiers. But L-3 Services allowed “scores of its employees to participate in torturing and abusing prisoners over an extended period of time,” the lawsuit stated. Not only that, but the company “willfully failed to report L-3 employees’ repeated assaults and other criminal conduct” to the United States and Iraq.

Among the claims against the company:

According to the lawsuit, one former inmate said he was forced to drink water until he vomited blood. Other allegations include rape, beatings, being slammed into a wall, and one man alleged he was subject to a mock execution at gunpoint. Many reportedly said they were forced to stand naked for long periods.

All I can say is how remarkable it is that a contractor is forced to pay damages for torture, while the US government refuses even to acknowledge that it authorized and implemented it, that it tortured at least a score of prisoners to death, that no one – no one – involved in the authorization of these war crimes has faced any legal or professional consequences and that war criminals, like Stanley McChrystal, who presided over one of the worst torture camps in Iraq, Camp Nama, ("Nasty-Ass Military Area"), can go on the Daily Show as if he is just another general. No he isn't. Under his command some of the worst incidents of torture took place. Why did Jon Stewart not ask him about that? When will these people be publicly challenged to defend their history of crimes against humanity?

If we can hold contractors accountable, why not the public sector which paid them?

A Poem For The President

This week saw the announcement of Richard Blanco, who is both Cuban-American and gay, as the Inaugural poet. Katy Waldman describes the task before him as perhaps "the trickiest of all" for a poet, "requiring a kind of ringing, triumphal, sentimental tone that seems at odds with the evasions and double-backs of so much good poetry." She elaborates:

Blanco must address not only Obama but the entire world. He confided in an NPR interview that his main hurdle will be to "maintain sort of that sense of intimacy and that conversational tone in a poem that obviously has to sort of encompass a whole lot more than just my family and my experience." Walking such a tightrope—the poet as creative individual, the poet as mouthpiece for something bigger—should test Blanco in interesting ways, especially given that his self-image as an outsider provides a through line for much of his work.

Well he couldn't be worse than Maya Angelou. In an interview with the Poetry Society of America, Blanco described how he approaches politics:

Being a Cuban-American from Miami many people presume that I am a hard-core right-wing conservative; on the other hand, as a queer poet, many immediately think I am a total left-wing liberal.

I resent these assumptions; and—like most artists, I suppose—I rebel against expectations and stereotypes…My poetry and I are not exclusively aligned with any one particular group—Latino, Cuban, queer, or "white." Though I embrace and respect each one, I prefer wading in the middle where I can examine and question all sides of all "stories."

I was inclined to say that my poetry is apolitical, but thinking about it more carefully here, instead I would say my work may be pan-political. By this I mean that I am interested in many political angles, often contradictory ones, whether describing my destitute Tía Ida living in a Cuba crippled by Socialism, or the broken spirit of a small town in Italy erased by run-a-muck Capitalism. Regardless, one thing is clear to me: rather than "talk" politics in my work, I prefer to "show" the consequences of politics through portraits of people and places. I am more interested in the effects than the causes, in discovering how we survive and make sense of all the suffering the world throws in our faces over and over again, rather than finding a politicized reason for the chaos or pointing a finger at someone or something. For me, it's not about finding blame or solutions; it's narrating the stories of survival and, hopefully, triumph of the human spirit.

Covering Up Climate Change

Jill Fitzsimmons delivers the results of a Media Matters study on climate change coverage in 2012:

Together, the nightly news programs on ABC, CBS and NBC devoted only 12 segments to climate change in 2012. PBS' coverage stood out, with its nightly news program dedicating 23 segments to the issue.

Sunday morning was even worse:

Since 2009, climate coverage on the Sunday shows has declined every year. In 2012, the Sunday shows spent less than 8 minutes on climate change, down from 9 minutes in 2011, 21 minutes in 2010, and over an hour in 2009. The vast majority of coverage — 89 percent — was driven by politics, and none was driven by scientific findings.

This video is the first mention of the record-setting 2012 temperatures on Fox News – "before [host] Gutfeld interjected by shouting: 'Lies.'" One day, I suspect, people will look back on that attitude and wonder why this kind of denialism only exists in any serious institutional form on the American right – anywhere in the world. No other major party of the right in the West is that crazy.

A Note On The Leveretts

I totally understand my reader's reaction to the series of reader interviews. There were times in these interviews when I found myself at a loss for words when I think of the murderous state apparatus I saw gunning kids down in the street and sending in thugs to break and torture them later. But obviously, we do not pick our Ask Anything guests on the basis of agreeing with them. Precisely the opposite. We're not afraid of real debate. We think it's been absent for quite some time.

Part of what we're trying to here is to widen the debate so all parties can be heard, to expand the public policy debate beyond the confines of the Beltway Consensus. And the absence of comments does not prevent readers directly responding to the interviewees. Because readers get to pick the questions they get asked. I don't know of many other crowd-sourced interviews out there and the point is to evoke candid questions that the often wimpy MSM won't ask.

Ask The Leveretts Anything: How Should Obama Deal With Iran?

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During the Iranian uprising of 2009, the Dish continuously clashed with Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett, the most well-known skeptics of the Green Movement. The husband and wife team continue to blog at Going to Tehran, in addition to Flynt’s role as Penn State Professor of International Affairs and Hillary’s role as Professorial Lecturer at American University and CEO of the political risk consultancy, Stratega. In 2011, they argued “there has been no Nixon to China moment under Obama.” Watch their previous videos here, here, here and here. A reader dissents to the series:

As a long-time follower of The Dish – it was instrumental to me as I was launching EA WorldView (then Enduring America) in 2008 and especially during the post-election crisis in Iran in 2009 – I have been unsettled by the platform you have given the Leveretts to push their book and their portrayal of life in Iran. While I fully agree that a well-rounded view of Iran and of US-Iran relations is essential to avoid military conflict and to find a way out of the punishing economic warfare, the Leveretts do not serve this purpose for me. Instead, they are pro-regime polemicists putting forth under-informed, rose-coloured caricatures of the leadership and the internal situation.

I would have responded directly on The Dish if it had a Disqus facility. I did try to respond on Going to Tehran, but the Leveretts have blocked any substantial questioning of their comments. For what it’s worth, this was my reaction:

A post reinforcing the hope that Going to Tehran will focus solely on the US approach to Iran and not venture any “analysis” on the Islamic Republic’s “internal dynamics” … .

A few questions to cut through the superficial reply and condescension about “how Americans been conditioned”:

1. While the introduction to how the system works in principle is useful, can the Leveretts explain – beyond an elegy of “populist” Ahmadinejad – how the current government established legitimacy in 2009? There’s nothing here in this answer.

2. If Ahmadinejad is the triumphant “populist”, with overwhelming public support, can the Leveretts explain the hostility of most elements of the regime – including, at times, the Supreme Leader’s office – towards him?

3. If the Ahmadinejad economic legacy is so successful, can the Leveretts explain why he was only able to pass one stage of his subsidy reforms, and then after great delay? Can they explain why the second stage has been blocked by Parliament and is unlikely to see the light of day?

4. Can the Leveretts explain a current inflation rate which, by official figures, is almost 30% and – according to some MPs and Iranian economists – between 40 and 60%? Can they explain the 40% drop in oil exports? The 70% drop in the value of the currency? The rise in unemployment, especially among those under 30?

I am even more distressed by the elegy given by the Leveretts in the second video. While recognising the advances of women in the Islamic Republic, any observer should also note the limitations on women’s rights – for example, the recent legislation further restricting women’s right to travel outside Iran and their “family rights” – and the detentions of women such as attorney Nasrine Sotoudeh and student activist Bahareh Hedayat, thrown in prison for daring to represent clients and for calling for political reform.

By the way, very best wishes on your Big Adventure with the new site – I am rooting for you.

Another also takes issue with the second video about women in Iran:

First off, all the educational programs put in place for women were put in place during the Shah. If the Mullahs had their way, women would not have be permitted to receive a higher education (as women even today are not allowed to major in certain fields that are deemed inappropriate for them). And watching and listening to the rant of the Leveretts, one would blindly think they were talking about a utopia in which the rights of women were equal and actually embraced. Oh yes, a regime in which women are worth ½ of men in court “embraces” women’s rights. A regime that has stoned women to death. A regime that has raped young girls before their executions so that they don’t “die as virgins” as “virgins go straight to heaven”. Such a “utopia” that women have had under the Islamic Republic.

It is a shame that such drivel is espoused by so-called “intellectuals”. A true travesty. The Leveretts are not only the greatest apologists for a tyrannical and oppressive regime, they consistently host Islamic Republic regime agents on their site such as Mohammad Mirandi. In addition, they travel to Iran on behalf of the regime. Not to mention that they have openly admitted members of the Basiji and Revolutionary Guards on their “blog”. Anyhow, I just wanted to voice my displeasure in hearing their rant on your page. We have freedom of speech and freedom of expression, but I found this to be uncharacteristic of you to give a voice to two people who bank on a totalitarian regime through sheer utter lies and Islamic Republic apologia.

Another:

I was born and raised in Iran. I’ve been watching the few videos you put up of these IRI sympathizers, and I’m trying to keep a level head, but it’s hard to watch. You can’t just put lopsided opinions up without balancing them. Iran also stones women to death. Although the majority of students in Iran are females (which started in the ’80s because a lot of young men were at war), their salaries, authority, and positions come nowhere near men’s. Women have no right to divorce. Women have very limited rights. Really, can you balance the gibberish? It’s hard to watch.

Cannabis Kills No One

A reader challenges my assertion that overdosing on marijuana is a "physical impossibility":

Do you have any actual evidence that dying from smoking marijuana violates one or more laws of physics?

Exhibit A: Judge Young's findings from the 1988 DEA hearing [pdf] that considered reclassifying marijuana as a Schedule 2 drug:

Nearly all medicines have toxic, potentially lethal effects. But marijuana is not such a substance. There is no record in the extensive medical literature describing a proven, documented cannabis-induced fatality. This is a remarkable statement. First, the record on marijuana encompasses 5,000 years of human experience. Second, marijuana is now used daily by enormous numbers of people throughout the world… Yet, despite this long history of use and the extraordinarily high numbers of social smokers, there are simply no credible medical reports to suggest that consuming marijuana has caused a single death…

In a 2009 paper [pdf] on non-medical use of cannabis, Wayne Hall and Louisa Degenhardt round up the literature on its short- and long-term health effects. On the acute effects:

A dose of 2–3 mg of THC will produce a high in occasional users who typically share a single joint with others. Regular users might smoke up to 3–5 joints of potent cannabis a day for several reasons, including development of tolerance and to experience stronger e?ects… The dose of THC that kills rodents is very high and the estimated fatal human dose is between 15 g and 70 g, which is much higher than that smoked by a heavy user.

Note that the fatal dose is at least 5,000 times the dose that will produce a high in occasional users. On driving while high:

Studies of the e?ects of cannabis upon on-road driving found more modest impairments than those caused by intoxicating doses of alcohol because cannabis-a?ected people drive more slowly and take fewer risks. Nonetheless, some experimental studies have shown diminished driving performance in response to emergency situations… Driving after having taken cannabis might increase the risk of motor vehicle crashes 2–3 times compared with 6–15 times with alcohol.

On the effects of chronic use, "defined as almost daily use over a period of years":

In Australia, Canada, and the USA, cannabis dependence is the most common type of drug dependence after that on alcohol and tobacco… The lifetime risk of dependence in cannabis users has been estimated at about 9%, rising to one in six in those who initiate use in adolescence. The equivalent lifetime risks are 32% for nicotine, 23% for heroin, 17% for cocaine, 15% for alcohol, and 11% for stimulant users.