Month: April 2013

by Patrick Appel

Brendan Koerner profiles Alfred Anaya, who created hi-tech “traps,” hidden compartments in cars. Making traps, in and of itself, is not illegal, but Anaya is serving a more than 24 year sentence because some of his clients used his traps to transport drugs:

A common hacker refrain is that technology is always morally neutral. The culture’s libertarian ethos holds that creators shouldn’t be faulted if someone uses their gadget or hunk of code to cause harm; the people who build things are under no obligation to meddle in the affairs of the adults who consume their wares.

But Alfred Anaya’s case makes clear that the government rejects that permissive worldview. The technically savvy are on notice that they must be very careful about whom they deal with, since calculated ignorance of illegal activity is not an acceptable excuse. But at what point does a failure to be nosy edge into criminal conduct? In light of what happened to Anaya, that question is nearly impossible to answer.

by Patrick Appel

Bee Wilson enjoyed Mary Roach’s new book, Gulp:

If you’ve ever wondered why some people complain of gassiness after beans, while others eat them with impunity, Roach has the answer. If you’ve never wondered, too bad; Roach is going to tell you anyway. Apparently, half of the population lack a certain enzyme in the colon that is needed to break down the complex carbohydrates in legumes. As a result, they are “troubled by beans.” When the colon inflates, releasing gas, it is a “warning system”: “Because stretching can be a prelude to bursting, your brain is highly motivated to let you know what’s happening down there.”

In an interview about her book, Roach sings the praises of saliva:

[I]n saliva there’s these histatins which help wounds heal. So when someone kisses a baby’s booboo, like a scrape, or when a pet licks its wounds, it’s actually – because you think oh, oh, it’s full of bacteria, don’t do that. But there’s these healing elements. Saliva was a home remedy for cuts and scrapes and shankers and things. People would apply the spittle of a – first-thing-in-the-morning spittle of an old man or something would be, like, the remedy. But there’s some medical sense to it.

by Doug Allen

Tyler Cowen connects alcohol to the gun control debate:

In part our guns problem is an alcohol problem.  According to Mark Kleiman, half the people in prison were drinking when they did whatever they did. … There are connections between alcohol and wife-beating and numerous other social ills, including health issues of course.

It worries me when people focus on “guns” and do not accord an equivalent or indeed greater status to “alcohol” as a social problem.  Many of those people drink lots of alcohol, and would not hesitate to do so in front of their children, although they might regard owning an AK-47, or showing a pistol to the kids, as repugnant.  I believe they are a mix of hypocritical and unaware, even though many of these same individuals have very high IQs and are well schooled in the social sciences.  Perhaps they do not want to see the parallels.

Previous Dish on alcohol as the most harmful drug here.

by Brendan James

A reader writes:

Concerning this post, I think you and Ed Kilgore are talking past each other.  Ed’s talking about the Religious Right; you’re talking about “young evangelicals.”  Not exactly the same thing—indeed, the young evangelicals you’re speaking of seem to be moving away from the Right, or at least modifying it to accommodate what is now clearly a cause as lost as keeping evangelicals from divorcing.

But if you focus on, say, the Tea Party, as Ed does, it’s apparent that the persistent efforts of some clueless pundits to characterize it as a “libertarian” movement miss the point.  It’s not the deficit these people are concerned with; after all, where were they in the oughts?  They’re concerned, as ever, with the federal government taking stuff away from deserving folk like themselves and giving it to undeserving folk like the poor, or the uninsured, or parasitic elites in academia, the bureaucracy, etc.

And for them this is a moral cause; that Obama is in the business of taking from the “right” people and giving to the “wrong” ones isn’t a policy disagreement, it’s proof of his moral perfidy.  That they are utterly clueless about the federal budget and the fact that they are major beneficiaries of federal redistribution policies makes it all the easier for them to strike this self-righteous pose; there’s no “libertarianism” for them if it touches “their” Medicare.  It really is the culture war by another means.

I understand this point, that libertarianism and Christianism are not a priori incompatible (even if it requires some slippery semantics) and so a rise in the former need not lead to perestroika. But the fact is that evangelicals are the core of the religious right, and if the next generation is becoming libertarian on social matters like marriage—we could talk about drugs as well—that’s a big problem for the old guard that organizes much of the base around cultural paranoia. If this generational shift continues, how small is the Christian Right’s tent going to shrink before they lack the clout Kilgore and the rest of us are worried about?

by Chris Bodenner

Many readers are flagging this news – the formation of a PAC called the Bearded Entrepreneurs for the Advancement of a Responsible Democracy (BEARD). Money quote:

“It’s been 125 years since our last bearded President, Benjamin Harrison, was elected. We’re hoping that with our support, bearded individuals will shrug off over a century of political irrelevance and start running for office again.”

Update from a reader:

The news about the PAC has even more Sully Bait than I expected. If you go to Jonathan Sessions’ web site (he’s the founder of the PAC), and then go to his link about upgrading from IE, you’ll find his 404 page with a lovely picture of beagle puppies. What’s better than that?

Bearded beagle puppies?