Marijuana, Flavored Cigarettes, And Well-Meaning Thugs

Remember when we were all thinking that Obama would work to at least decriminalize marijuana, the first step towards a rational drug policy? Yeah, right. And, sure he will.

We're going the other way.

Now that Obama signed the bill transferring the regulation of tobacco to the FDA, we are finally ridding ourselves of a major menace: clove cigarettes. Here's a quote from the Fourth Estate:

This particular part of the new restrictions, the cigarette flavoring ban, is specifically intended to help reduce under-age smoking, to stop the habit before it starts. Many studies have shown that the flavored cigarettes appeal most to younger people, not least of all because it masks the harshness of the inhaled smoke and thus makes it easier to start smoking.

Some responses:

1. This is an obvious "bootleggers and Baptists" situation.
2. Clove cigarettes are monstrously harsh when inhaled.
   
3. This law will barely, if at all, dent underage smoking.
4. "Won't somebody please think of the children?!"
5. This is the kind of law that technocrats love. (Technocrat: New type of bureaucrat; intensely trained in engineering or economics and devoted to the power of national planning; came to fore in offices of governments following World War II.)
6. If you're a liberal, what will you do when the feds illegalize something you like? Nothing, of course, because you know they have your best interests in mind.
7. This is the hell liberals want -- top-down control of our behavior in "our best interest."
8. As our governments take over more than the half of health-care that they've already usurped in this country, arguments about the externalities of dangerous or self-destructive behavior will become ubiquitous (i.e. you can't be allowed to ride a bicycle without a helmet, white-water raft, drive seatbelt-less, or drink alcohol {what? you don't think that there are technocratic liberals who would like to prohibit alcohol?} because "society" has to pay for all of your health care.)
   
9. A habit of thinking through consequences regulates most peoples' behavior when Big Brother doesn't try to cocoon them with legislation and taxes. These laws do the opposite. They infantilize us as badly as Medicare or whatever monstrosity we'll get out of Obama's push to take over medicine completely.
   

Jan Helfeld, pimp (not the ACORN kind)

Jan Helfeld is a gonzo journalist and a libertarian. He somehow gets interviews with pols in which he asks them questions about how they justify their stances on things like minimum wages, invading countries, and redistributing wealth.

Here are my favorite YouTube clips of his interviews with Congressors:

• This with Harry Reid is Helfeld's most famous clip and this is of Reid saying that welfare was a failure.
• Iraq War booster Heather Wilson contradicts herself regarding how much of a threat S. Hussein is.
• This one with Pete Stark is saddening because he's the only out-atheist in Congress and I wanted to like him. It's impossible because besides showing many of the standard logical fallacies, he ends the interview by physically threatening Helfeld on tape and then (according to Helfeld) acting like a straight thug.
• This is of Nancy Pelosi on how she can justify not paying the minimum wage to her own employees when she is a huge fan of a minimum wage, and ends with a weird impromptu speech.
• These are of James Clyburn and John Lewis advocating for modern racism. Clyburn's self-contradictions are stark and hilarious.
• Here, Esteban Torres has one of his aids steal one of the interview tapes. A large court settlement followed.
• In this, Tom Daschle can't understand how making stuff "free" will cause people to use more of it.

In the UK the "public servants" must answer much more aggressive questions from much more aggressive people than Helfeld. Here, the "public servants" will go beyond churlish and into illegal and thuggish (literally) if they're asked questions they don't like by a calm, unthreatening interviewer. "Public servants" (especially from the ostensibly more open (D) side) should be ready for questions like Helfeld's, but they're not because our media spends most of its time tossing salad.

Live By The Turnbuckle, Die By The Turnbuckle

My review of "The Wrestler" with spoilers.

It's a great movie, with an understandably high score at Rotten Tomatoes, but it's got a big flaw.

A digression:

One of my favorite customers (a bartender) has said that the first bar you work at is the last bar you work at. It's what Randy is dealing with as his health diminishes; he's now working in the small venues where he probably started. But this time around, these small venues are even worse because of the changed expectations of the crowds. Throughout the movie, there is the explicit comparison of wrestling to stripping, but the implicit (and more accurate) comparison is to porn. And as with porn today compared to porn of yore, the crowd's tastes are very jaded. They don't want doggy-style; they want bukkake and maybe "Two Chicks, One Cup." As such, the "match" just prior to Randy's chest-cracking is grotesque and hellish. Because he doesn't have much choice and is generally game, he'll accept the staple gun and the barbed wire, but it's probably not where he expected his career to end up.

But here's my real point: Randy is too good and sociable a person to be so isolated from everyone.

I'm not talking about his daughter. Their relationship would always be tenuous because when she was young he was a no-good, absentee father. I'm not talking about Pam who's fighting the reality that the best man she may be able to pull after a lifetime of poor decisions is the crass, broken (but charming, considerate, 80s obsessed) Randy. (But she gets it by the end.) I'm talking about the hundreds/thousands of co-workers, promoters, and fans who can't even be bothered to show up at his hospital bed. Now, there's no way that the grapevine would not lead to many of these unlikely ingrates knowing about his situation. And there's no way that none of them would find some way to help him.

A Picture Of Randy -- Two Lists Of Characteristics:

High time-preference
Not-high IQ
Forgetful
An industry-common drug habit

*****

Kind
Unarrogant
Considerate of others' welfare
Physically strong
Open to new experiences
Professional
Humorous
A willing leader and follower

The good hugely outweigh the bad. Randy forgets some of the details outside the ring, but he goes out of his way to please his fans and he improves every wrestler around him (who are best viewed as beefy drama geeks in the same troupe.) He's basically a lovable alpha male at the end of his career. Although he headlines the shows, he's not a threat and wants to see the youth succeed. In fact, in the wrestling world, every single person he comes across smiles and has a kind word.

But beyond just the hospital SNAFU: no job for Randy? Not one of the legion of people happy to see him notice his trip to the emergency room, age, scars, joints, and that he might need a job as a bouncer? Sure, they're not rolling in dough and he doesn't whine about his pains, but I can't think of anyone I've known who was as broadly popular as Randy, and I can think of plenty who received a LOT more care from their community.

The traits that make him endearing to the viewer would make him endearing to almost everyone around him. Unless you can swallow that they would all be ungrateful, inconsiderate, and clueless, they would support him and stop his self-destruction.

*****

Finally, his adaptation to working the deli counter was quick and awesome. Clearly, he could tolerate prosaic work by turning it into a silly drama, and if he'd had any kind of emotional support he would have given to the fan who precipitates his bloody, ridiculous, careful-not-to-hurt-anyone meltdown an autograph instead of a fit.

The Five Reactions

Social creatures evince many similar characteristics, regardless of their species. Jane Goodall won't quit talking about it. But intra-human social interactions often look a lot like intra-canine interactions... which is one of the things that makes "The Dog Whisperer" the only reality-TV show worth watching.

Cesar Milan (the "whisperer") has elucidated doggie responses to other dogs as:

1) Flight
2) Fight
3) Avoidance
4) Submission
5) Dominance

Of course (as Cesar shows over and over) dogs view humans as dogs, which makes socializing dogs pretty easy if the humans don't anthropomorphize too much (but I doubt most people would let even children get away with the crap the dogs in the show are getting away with.)

But, people react to each other in one of these five ways really often. Flight/fight aren't common reactions, but you see them when the cops aren't around and the people don't know one another. Avoidance is super-common; it's often (but not always) associated with submission on the TDW, but some humans use it regularly just to stay out of a hierarchy which they wouldn't find advantageous. Submission describes the normal response of people who on first meeting praise excessively, laugh at everything said... Finally, you have the go-to of the alphas: dominance. The alphas set the stage, get the first crack...

Humans can be more genteel and egalitarian than all this, especially when they're immersed in esoterica, but they revert to the simple patterns the instant they drink, take drugs, get into large gangs, etc. It's as if the neo-cortex takes a powder. Mix a large group of friends with a few half-racks and send them outside. They'll quickly rank each other, they'll see non-group humans as threats (based on the others' group size), they'll yell at and push around non-pack members. The best responses to these types are to avoid them or to be loud, appear a credible threat.

******

The bread and butter of TDW is the segment I think of as, "Listen, Yuppie!" It goes:

1) Cesar listens to tales of the dog dominating the owner
2) Cesar tells the owner (who's usually surprised) that the dog thinks the owner is an underling in the pack
3) Cesar explains that dogs speak a simple language that humans can learn, that dogs can't understand "time-outs"
4) Cesar immediately changes the dog's behaviour and shows how the owner can maintain this situation

This segment-type is often peopled with career-track couples who've avoided having kids because of the effect on said careers. They think their dogs can understand English (given enough time) and that they will be permanently mentally scarred by some mild physical discipline. TTFN.

Life Is Like A Box Of Shock Absorbers

For social creatures, a key question is:

"How do I calibrate my behavior?"

If you're too scared to offend people, you'll limit yourself more than you need and enjoy life less than you could. But if you don't want to be kicked out of the herd, you'll need to curb your transgressions.

I once read a recommendation for down-hill mountain bikers: set your shock absorbers so that they bottom out once per ride. This allows the absorbers to sometimes compress fully while not constantly clanging. If you restrict the absorber too much, you'll never clang, but you'll also not experience the maximum speed and comfort caused by full absorber travel.

So, push your social limits once in a while. All of them.

A corollary to this is to not take offense to the somewhat aggressive behavior of others. They're probably seeking some negative feedback, which you should just give and move on. Don't throw a fit when someone pushes; just push back a little and go back to however you were acting beforehand. And don't be a passive-aggressive Seattle-ish type. Getting angry without saying anything is pathetic.

Lead Painters: Parents:: Bootleggers: Baptists

Creationists deride natural selection as "random." They cannot envision a godless selection process able to produce complicated creatures. They remind me of liberals who can't envision regulation of businesses by anything but a government.

The biggest threat to any business is that it's customers will decide to quit buying. When a Taco Bell in New York was taken over by rats, it wasn't because there was no government inspector. There's always a government inspector, but they fail constantly even though they cost a lot. So Taco Bell does what any corporation in this situation does:

Fire some irresponsible workers
Suck up to the untouched customers
Make amends to the harmed customers
See where quality control went haywire

Fear of loss of customers is the best kind of regulation; nobody has to be taxed to pay for it, businesses with a better track record will gain ground on consistent under-performers, industry leaders will find cheap ways to improve safety -- which will improve the whole industry when competitors copy the new best practices. All of this comes about because customers have so many ways to find out how corporations are screwing up. This guarantees incremental improvements and more efficient, cheaper ways to make customers happy.

So these are the basic reasons we don't usually need legislation to improve safety. The demands of customers for constant improvements and cheaper prices will drive corporations to find safer ways to do things than those that are now known.

But liberals can't accept this because they can't see how any process which omits government could lead to steadily greater outcomes and more order. They think it's impossible for the undirected actions of millions of individuals to have an effect on corporations. They demand legislative fixes instead. This is what leads to atrocities like the CPSIA which have the primary effect of removing competition and new sources of ideas for quality control from the marketplace. The key thing to remember is that with all government regulations, the public forces loudly demanding the legislation are not the only forces who quietly support it. The biggest corporations (whose screw-ups may have precipitated the liberal outcry for regulation in the first place) may want the legislation (with its increased costs) because it keeps new competition out of the market.

This audio clip is an hour long and describes how GM (with the help of some liberal do-gooders) screwed Honda with a catalytic converter. If you want to know how government regulations are impoverishing you, this is a good place to start.

I Like It When They Don't Even Pretend.

The Huffington Post on CEO Bob Mackey: prepare to experience journalistic integrity:

As the NY Times write-up of "the most unexpected" sideshow to the 2009 Health Care Debate put it: "Reaction from pro-reform Whole Foods shoppers was swift and vociferous."

Mackey is pro-reform, which is clear when one reads his WSJ Op-Ed. If his plan (which is similar to that prescribed by Milton Friedman) were enacted, the changes would be monumental. But for some liberals (such as Brian Beutler from the NYT article) if it's not in the direction of a single-payer system, it's not "reform." HuffPost should be able to field authors who can differentiate between different kinds of "reform." (Since 46% of healthcare in the US is paid for with tax dollars, it's not as if there's no room to increase the scope of the non-coerced market for health care.)

Now the Change To Win Investment Group and United Food And Commercial Workers Union -- both a part of the Change To Win federation of unions representing six million workers -- have put out statements criticizing Mackey and encouraging a boycott of the store.

This is about as likely to work as Bill O'Reilly's boycott of France over their aversion to the Iraq war. It's enlightening to see unions acting like BO'R, though.

CtW called for Mackey's removal as chairman of the board and CEO. "Mr. Mackey attempted to capitalize on the brand reputation of Whole Foods to champion his personal political views, but has instead deeply offended a key segment of Whole Foods consumer base," the group's executive director Bill Patterson said in a statement. UFCW has begun handing out pamphlets to Whole Food shoppers. The group said Mackey's op-ed was an "attempt to undermine Obama's health-care reform." (Whole Foods is not unionized.)

If liberals won't give the CEO of even a beloved chain a chance to describe non-Obamacare solutions, then they are as blinkered and reactionary as conservatives who still adore George Bush. Most liberals don't even know that wage fixing during WWII lead to our current health care system or how huge government interference already is. And if they shut up people like Mackey (as CtW and the UFCW want to) they never will.

Not everyone is so taken aback by Mackey's suggestions.

Why the italics? Every single libertarian and most conservatives would prefer Mackey's solutions to Obama's. To paraphrase: not everyone thinks that Obamacare will destroy America.

In the Washington Post, Kathleen Parker declared, "Now is the time for all good capitalists to shop at Whole Foods." Parker's sentiments are echoed by several conservative bloggers and journalists. Doug Bandow wrote in the American Conservative that "it is good to see at least one company stand on principle." Blogger Radley Balko of The Agitator blog strongly concurred: "I plan to do a lot more shopping at Whole Foods in the coming weeks."

The author can't make a simple differentiation between libertarian and conservative. Radley Balko used to work at Cato and now works at Reason, both famously libertarian organizations. For somone like the author, the distinction may not matter, or she can't figure out how to research his history.