| Doug Casey
is a contributing editor of Liberty. |
|
The War on Glass Escalates —
Even as the bogus War on Terror escalates, the ridiculous War on Drugs
drags on. I was shocked and disgusted to see that actor and comedian
Tommy Chong began a nine-month federal prison sentence on Oct. 7 for
operating a glass-blowing shop that sold bongs. He wasn't selling dope (not
that that should be a crime), but just "paraphernalia," a totally artificial
class of things. As unbelievable as I found this, what was really shocking and
disgusting was that the U.S. attorney argued that Chong deserved an
especially severe punishment because his films "trivialize law enforcement
efforts to combat drug trafficking and use." It's not just that they put him in
jail for a phony non-crime, twice-removed, but they really did it because he
was a comic, making fun of them. The First Amendment still gets lip service,
but apparently it doesn't protect some forms of speech. — Doug
Casey
| Jane S. Shaw
is a Senior Associate of PERC — The center for Free Market
Environmentalism in Bozeman, Mont. |
|
Giving credit where debit is due
— On January 14, President Bush announced an initiative to
send astronauts to the moon and then Mars. His proposal, which will cost
taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars, was acclaimed as a renewal of the
vision that launched the first moon landing. A few critics raised eyebrows at
the cost, but the predominant tone was euphoric and echoed the Republican
lobbyist who said that space travel on this scale "will not be merely
revolutionary: it will be Promethean."
So where was the press? Experiencing mass amnesia. Just a year ago the
shuttle Columbia disintegrated into thousands of pieces across eastern
Texas because a piece of foam struck the spacecraft. NASA staff knew that
some foam had broken off, but they chose to ignore the possibility that it
would pose a problem. In August, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board
reported that the accident was caused not just by a mechanical problem
but, according to an official press release, by both "physical and
organizational causes." The report also said that "the NASA organizational
culture had as much to do with the accident as the foam that struck the
orbiter on ascent," that NASA's management system is "unsafe to manage
the shuttle system beyond the short term," and that the agency "does not
have a strong safety culture." In spite of that report, the same administrator
who oversaw the Columbia disaster, Sean O'Keefe, is in charge of NASA today.
And President Bush is handing over this enormous responsibility to him.
Everyone knows how hard it is to get rid of a government agency, no
matter how decrepit. This turn of events suggests that the worse the
agency's track record, the more promising its future. — Jane S.
Shaw
| Randal
O'Toole is senior economist with the Thoreau Institute.
|
|
Don't have a cow, USDA! — The
mad cow disease panic provides an important lesson about how
government doesn't work. Weeks after a cow is slaughtered, tests show that
the cow had the disease. Although it is soon acknowledged that many
people have probably eaten meat from this cow, the Department of
Agriculture (USDA), led by a secretary with ties to the agriculture industry,
piously argues that the food supply was safe.
Democrats called for a law requiring that "downer cows" — cows
that cannot stand or walk — be banned from the human food supply.
After a few days of hysteria, the Secretary of Agriculture caved in and
banned human consumption of downer cows.
A ban on downer cows is silly because many are unable to stand for
obvious reasons — for example, a broken leg — that have nothing
to do with mad cow disease. More importantly, such a ban would not have
prevented this problem, and might even have left it undetected. The infested
cow was not a downer; it was tested by the slaughterhouse only because
another cow in the same herd was a downer. If downer cows had been
banned from the food supply, its owner wouldn't have sold it to the
slaughterhouse, the herd would probably not have been tested, and the
diseased cow never detected.
Meanwhile, the calf of the diseased cow was found in a group of 450
calves — but no one kept track of which was which. So USDA ordered the
destruction of all 450 without testing any to see if they had mad cow disease.
The USDA seems to believe that the less the public knows about infected
cows, the better.
If we didn't have USDA "protection" of the food supply, food producers
would have to go to much greater lengths to assure people their food is
safe. USDA is more a protector of the industry than of food safety. The best
solution was proposed by the Food Marketing Institute, a trade group of the
grocery industry: test all suspect cows and their herdmates and don't allow
their meat to enter the food supply until the test results are in.
Implementing this would protect the public. But it apparently doesn't meet
the requirements of the cattle industry for a low-cost solution or the
requirements of the politicians for simplistic answers. — Randal
O'Toole
| David Weigel
is a journalist in Evanston, Ill. |
|
Eating your way to fame and fortune
— God is in his heaven and Timothy Dumouchel has dropped
his lawsuit. The 48-year-old Minnesota man had brightened up a slow
January news week when he stormed into the offices of Charter
Communications and announced that their cable was making his wife fat.
After threatening employees with a shark attack, he left a statement
affirming "that the reason I smoke and drink every day and my wife is
overweight is because we watched TV every day for the last four years." For
two days, from when he filed the threat to when he dropped it, he was taken
seriously.
If you've ever been to a small city council meeting, you're familiar with
the harmless crazy. He has a problem, he can't solve it, the city council has
to do it for him. I remember one man who asked the Wilmette city manager
to destroy the shrubbery around his house, and one man who told an
Evanston alderman that a new library branch was part of a scheme to
defraud white people. They were crazy. We nodded our heads and looked for
other questions.
I'm not sure if we'll be able to make sensible distinctions in the future.
The tobacco settlements of 1997 made it clear that stupid decisions can be
actionable. Since 2002, fast food companies have been targeted by people
with the same mentality. Dumouchel may be a kook, but he realized that
blaming weight gain on his nemesis was the surest way to getting what he
wanted. Let's hope other kooks weren't paying close attention. —
David Weigel
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