The War on Drugs is a war on African-American people

Leonard Pitts Jr. reviews Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow:

According to federal figures, blacks and whites use drugs at a roughly equal rate in percentage terms. In terms of raw numbers, whites are far and away the biggest users -- and dealers -- of illegal drugs.

So why aren't cops kicking their doors in? Why aren't their sons pulled over a dozen times in nine months? Why are black men 12 times likelier to be jailed for drugs than white ones? Why aren't white communities robbed of their fathers, brothers, sons?

Read more (via Classical Values)

Dangerous ice cream

Katherine Mangu-Ward explains how Afghanistan's Taliban and Brooklyn moms unite in their opposition to this concoction.

The failure of the Home Affordable Modification Program

Are politicians like Kucinich and Towns really this stupid? Or are they evil?

Obama's not doing all he can

According to an article in the Daily Caller this week by our former Cato colleague Chris Moody, foreign-owned ships have offered to assist the American-owned fleet in skimming oil and other tasks. But some of the foreign ships have hesitated to enter U.S. waters because of the 1920 law that reserves inter-coastal shipping to vessels that are built, owned, and crewed by Americans.

Although cloaked in terms of national security, the act is really a protectionist measure designed to insulate U.S.-based shipbuilders, ship operators, and their unionized crews from global competition.

Persistence

In 1974 the transplant team was just cutting open a man in his mid-60s when he started coughing.

Cecil Adams:

They sewed him back up and he died for real 15 hours later, at which point I presume the surgeons took up where they left off.

Negative comprehension

Sometimes I take the smartness game too far and try to watch a film in one language I've studied, with the DVD subtitles set in another (say, a Hindi film with Spanish subs). The end result is usually a headache-inducing mental tug-of-war that yields, if such a thing is possible, negative comprehension. I ask myself, why would a person do that? Not to feel smarter, certainly not to get more out of the movie. Could it be that I love watching movies with subtitles because they make me feel dumber?

Another failure for the Obama administration

State governments have overspent, largely on salaries that far exceed those in the private sector and benefits packages that dwarf what most Americans get. So now those governments are spending their money on powerful high-dollar lobbyists, with the paramount goal of getting access to more federal money. But the federal government is hopelessly in deficit.

The result is this: Local government officials are using your money to hire former government officials to ask current federal officials to give local governments more federal money — and future taxpayers will foot the bill for this whole racket.

Weather for an old man

Believe it or not, this is comfortable for me: a Temperature of 86°, 79% Humidity, and a Dew Point of 79° F, with Heat Index of 99° is comfortable for me. As long as I'm just sitting around with a fan on me, anyway.

What to read and say and eat and drink and wear

Nothing is so galling to a people not broken in from the birth as a paternal, or in other words a meddling government, a government which tells them what to read and say and eat and drink and wear.

--Lord Macaulay, "Southey's Colloquies on Society"

Triviality destroys at once robustness of thought and delicacy of feeling

From The Right To Privacy by Samuel Warren and Louis D. Brandeis (Originally published in 4 Harvard Law Review 193 [1890]):

Instantaneous photographs and newspaper enterprise have invaded the sacred precincts of private and domestic life; and numerous mechanical devices threaten to make good the prediction that "what is whispered in the closet shall be proclaimed from the house-tops." For years there has been a feeling that the law must afford some remedy for the unauthorized circulation of portraits of private persons;¹¹ and the evil of the invasion of privacy by the newspapers, long keenly felt, has been but recently discussed by an able writer.¹² The alleged facts of a somewhat notorious case brought before an inferior tribunal in New York a few months ago,¹³ directly involved the consideration of the right of circulating portraits; and the question whether our law will recognize and protect the right to privacy in this and in other respects must soon come before our courts for consideration.

Of the desirability--indeed of the necessity--of some such protection, there can, it is believed, be no doubt. The press is overstepping in every direction the obvious bounds of propriety and of decency. Gossip is no longer the resource of the idle and of the vicious, but has become a trade, which is pursued with industry as well as effrontery. To satisfy a prurient taste the details of sexual relations are spread broadcast in the columns of the daily papers. To occupy the indolent, column upon column is filled with idle gossip, which can only be procured by intrusion upon the domestic circle. The intensity and complexity of life, attendant upon advancing civilization, have rendered necessary some retreat from the world, and man, under the refining influence of culture, has become more sensitive to publicity, so that solitude and privacy have become more essential to the individual; but modern enterprise and invention have, through invasions upon his privacy, subjected him to mental pain and distress, far greater than could be inflicted by mere bodily injury. Nor is the harm wrought by such invasions confined to the suffering of those who may be made the subjects of journalistic or other enterprise. In this, as in other branches of commerce, the supply creates the demand. Each crop of unseemly gossip, thus harvested, becomes the seed of more, and, in direct proportion to its circulation, results in a lowering of social standards and of morality. Even gossip apparently harmless, when widely and persistently circulated, is potent for evil. It both belittles and perverts. It belittles by inverting the relative importance of things, thus dwarfing the thoughts and aspirations of a people. When personal gossip attains the dignity of print, and crowds the space available for matters of real interest to the community, what wonder that the ignorant and thoughtless mistake its relative importance. Easy of comprehension, appealing to that weak side of human nature which is never wholly cast down by the misfortunes and frailties of our neighbors, no one can be surprised that it usurps the place of interest in brains capable of other things. Triviality destroys at once robustness of thought and delicacy of feeling. No enthusiasm can flourish, no generous impulse can survive under its blighting influence.

Just listing their remarks amounts to a rebuttal:

• the unauthorized circulation of portraits of private persons
• the evil of the invasion of privacy by the newspapers
• the consideration of the right of circulating portraits
• Gossip is no longer the resource of the idle and of the vicious, but has become a trade, which is pursued with industry as well as effrontery
• To satisfy a prurient taste the details of sexual relations are spread broadcast in the columns of the daily papers
• To occupy the indolent, column upon column is filled with idle gossip, which can only be procured by intrusion upon the domestic circle
• man, under the refining influence of culture, has become more sensitive to publicity, so that solitude and privacy have become more essential to the individual
• modern enterprise and invention have, through invasions upon his privacy, subjected him to mental pain and distress, far greater than could be inflicted by mere bodily injury
• Each crop of unseemly gossip, thus harvested, becomes the seed of more, and, in direct proportion to its circulation, results in a lowering of social standards and of morality
• When personal gossip attains the dignity of print, and crowds the space available for matters of real interest to the community, what wonder that the ignorant and thoughtless mistake its relative importance
• Triviality destroys at once robustness of thought and delicacy of feeling. No enthusiasm can flourish, no generous impulse can survive under its blighting influence.

The US is a nice place to live, but...

• Nearly five thousand wrongful felony convictions occur each year from mistakes in fingerprint analysis.
• The U.S. tort system imposes an implicit tax burden to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars every year.
• Eminent domain abuse results in thousands of properties being taken each year.
• There are 2.3 million people behind bars and another 5.1 million on parole or probation in America, by far the highest incarceration rate in the world, outpacing all other developed nations by several fold.

Hammer or needle?

An article touting acupuncture demonstrates

that producing a local painful stimulus in mice causes the local release of ATP (adenosine triphosphate) that peaks at about 30 minutes. This correlates with a decreased pain response in the mice.

or as a commenter writes,

using the application of acute pain to cause a local response to that pain which temporarily also inhibits local chronic pain.

It reminds me of Samuel Beckett's Malone Dies (Malone meurt), where Lemuel, "flayed alive by memory, his mind crawling with cobras, not daring to dream or think and powerless not to," strikes himself with a hammer, preferably in the head, because it's bony, easy to reach, but perhaps most of all, "the seat of all shit and misery, so you rain blows upon it, with more pleasure than on the leg for example, which never did you any harm, it’s only human."

So Beckett was just as smart as the ancient Chinese.


Update

I like "all the shit and misery", apparently Beckett's own translation better than his original ("toutes les saloperies et pourritures"):

Ecorché vif du souvenir, l'esprit grouillant de cobras, n'osant ni rêver ni penser et en même temps impuissant à s'en défendre...la partie qu'il se frappait le plus volontiers, avec ce même marteau, c'était la tête, et cela se conçoit, car c'est là une partie osseuse aussi, et sensible, et facile à atteindre, et c'est là-dedans qu'il y a toutes les saloperies et pourritures, alors on tape dessus plus volontiers que sur la jambe par exemple, qui ne vous a rien fait, c'est humain.

How well did the Cash for Clunkers program work?

Not well.

2 definitions of "fairness"

Liberals focus on one kind of fairness, where everyone's needs are met to some degree. Conservatives, by contrast, see fairness when people are rewarded for their efforts, e.g., what they put in, they get to take out.