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Why categorize and measure students by race? Aren't there better ways to organize the data? "Lower-performing 9- and 13-year-olds make gains," says one section of the NAEP report. "No significant change for 17-year-olds at any performance level," says another. "Reading scores improve for 9-year-old public and private school students over long term," says a third. "Score increases for 17-year-olds whose parents did not finish high school," says a fourth. These tables organize the data by factors that can help us target and adjust educational policy: kids with low scores, kids in public school, kids in high school, kids whose parents didn't graduate. I'd like to see tables for income and spending per pupil, too. But race? Does that category really help? And what message does it send to kids when headlines assert a persistent "racial gap"?
More here.
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Six years ago, when Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome swept the world, governments bought thermal image scanners and set them up at airports. The idea was to spot overheated travelers and check them for fever before they infected others. Now the machines are being deployed again, this time to catch swine flu. But dozens of thermal imagers in Canada and Australia are sitting unused. ...
SARS and bird flu weren't the last plagues to spread across our planet. This flu won't be the last, either. Fortunately, all these viruses have one thing in common: fever. For now, late as it is, that heat signature is our best shot at catching them. Let's use it.
More here.
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Six signs that pot is being legalized de facto, courtesy of articles published this month by the Washington Post and New York Times:
1) 13 states have legalized medical marijuana. ...
2) [M]arijuana is now available as a medical treatment in California to almost anyone who tells a willing physician he would feel better if he smoked. Pot is now retailed over the counter in hundreds of storefronts across Los Angeles. ...
3) U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced that the Drug Enforcement Administration will no longer raid such stores.
4) [G]overnment surveys show that 100 million Americans have smoked pot or its resin, hashish, in their lifetimes, and 25 million have done so in the past year.
5) [A]dmission of marijuana use by the Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps was largely forgiven with a shrug.
6) [W]ith the recession prompting bulging budget deficits, some legislators in California and Massachusetts have gone further, suggesting that the drug could be legalized and taxed ...
[I]n California, pot is such a booming growth industry that lawmakers are being asked to consider its potential as a salve to the state's financial woes. Betty Yee, chairman of the California State Board of Equalization, endorsed a bill in February to regulate the estimated $14 billion marijuana market, citing the state's budget problems. California currently collects $18 million in sales taxes from marijuana dispensaries, and Yee said a regulated pot trade would bring in $1.3 billion.
Together, these developments convey the steady demise of the pot taboo. We don't really think marijuana use deserves prosecution. We're looking for ways to rationalize its legalization. One rationale is medical, and we don't seem to care much that this is largely a fraud. Another is financial: We know pot smoking is ubiquitous, so we might as well get some public revenue from it.
My guess is that criminal laws against marijuana use have become culturally untenable. At this point, if you want to maintain criminal laws against more dangerous drugs, you're better off conceding the legality of marijuana, lest the public lose respect for drug laws in general.
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Good news in the fight against teen pregnancy: The FDA is making to it easier for young people to get morning-after pills.
Here's the FDA's announcement:
On March 23, 2009, a federal court issued an order directing the FDA, within 30 days, to permit the Plan B drug sponsor to make Plan B available to women 17 and older without a prescription. The government will not appeal this decision. In accordance with the court's order, and consistent with the scientific findings made in 2005 by the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, FDA notified the manufacturer of Plan B informing the company that it may, upon submission and approval of an appropriate application, market Plan B without a prescription to women 17 years of age and older.
The New York Times warns that Plan B won't solve the problem:
Contraception advocates have pushed for easy access to Plan B for girls and women of all ages because the longer a woman delays in taking the medicine after unprotected sex, the more likely she will become pregnant. Eliminating doctors from the transactions, it was hoped, would lead to far fewer pregnancies and abortions. Indeed, advocates once predicted that widespread and easy access to emergency contraceptives would cut the number of induced abortions in half and slash teenage birth rates. But young people in the United States have so much unprotected sex—one in three girls under the age of 20 will get pregnant, with 80 percent of the pregnancies unplanned—that Plan B has been little more than a sandbag on an overtopped flood wall. Even women who are given the medicine free often fail to take it after having unprotected sex. "This is not going to be a cheap cure to the unintended pregnancy epidemic in this country," said James Trussell, director of the Office of Population Research at Princeton University.
Trussell has made the same point before: Emergency contraception has
not reduced unintended pregnancies in America or anywhere else that has introduced it. There is so much unprotected sex you would have to use so much emergency contraception to make a dent. ... It is not a magic bullet. If you want to seriously reduce unintended pregnancies in the UK you can only do [that] with implants and IUDs.
Why implants and IUDs? Because you don't have to think about them. They bypass the most common cause of what we erroneously call contraceptive failure: our own failure to use contraceptives properly and consistently.
I agree that using implants to bypass human failure is the most effective way to prevent unintended pregnancies. But that's no excuse for tolerating our failure in the first place. Emergency contraception, taken promptly after sex, can be (though you shouldn't rely on it) a magic bullet. But bullets don't work unless you fire them. Technology requires human agency.
Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, makes precisely this point about the FDA's decision: "Providing birth control, including emergency birth control, to young women helps them make responsible decisions and avoid unintended pregnancy."
The FDA hasn't solved the problem of unintended pregnancy. It has given you one more means to solve it. Go get your emergency contraception, now. And while you're at it, ask about an implant, so you won't have to count on a last-minute pill to bail you out. The responsibility is yours.
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If we expose the people who tortured terrorism detainees, whom will we go after next? The people who execute death-row prisoners?
The scenario makes sense. Executioners, like water-boarders, act under government orders. Executioners, unlike water-boarders, aim to kill. They do kill, by the dozens. And public support for the death penalty has been declining. It's not hard to envision a world in which we look back on capital punishment the way we now look back on torture.
Facing the prospect of exposure, if you were an executioner today, what would you do?
Washington state's executioners have made their decision: They're quitting. Here's the April 2 report from the Seattle Times:
Four people who have volunteered to administer lethal injections to death-row inmates at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla quit their positions this week, apparently worried that their identities could become public as a result of an ongoing court case to decide whether lethal injection constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. The four resigned Tuesday, which was the deadline Thurston County Superior Court Judge Chris Wickham had set for the team's records—detailing the members' credentials, qualifications and experience in administering lethal drugs—to be submitted for his review. The state is now without a lethal-injection team. ... "Walla Walla is a small town, so it's not hard to figure out (someone's identity) based on their qualifications," [a state official] said. "They don't want picketers showing up on their front lawns, and they don't want offenders knowing who they are."
In a follow-up story on April 15, the Times reported that a state senator has "introduced a bill that would forbid the release of names and other identifying information of execution team members." But the president of the Washington Coalition To Abolish the Death Penalty isn't backing down. He says, "[T]he public has a right to know whether members of an execution team are qualified to do [their] job."
Is execution as bad as water-boarding? Are executioners as culpable as torturers? Even if they aren't, should their identities be known?
And here's the harder question: Would you give the same answer about people who perform abortions? Do you think it's unfair that threats of exposure and picketing have led many doctors to quit doing abortions?
In the fury of a moral backlash, naming names and holding people accountable feels like the right thing to do. But before you go down that road, remember that the choice of targets won't always be yours.
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The difference between SERE and the Bush interrogation program is the difference between S&M and rape. There is no consent. There are no mutually understood boundaries. There are no magic words. People who can't tell the difference between rape and S&M go to jail. What happens to people who can't tell the difference between torture and training?
More here.
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Does torture inflict lasting psychological harm?
Yesterday we examined the CIA's reasons for involving psychologists in the Bush torture—sorry, I meant detainee interrogation program. The psychologist's job was to figure out how to inflict unbearable anguish on prisoners without requiring violence, or at least without leaving visible scars.
But what about mental scars?
In the Los Angeles Times, Sarah Gantz and Ben Meyerson look into the controversy:
The conclusion in recently released Justice Department memos that CIA interrogation techniques would not cause prolonged mental harm is disputed by some doctors and psychologists, who say that the mental damage incurred from the practices is significant and undeniable. ... Interrogation techniques undoubtedly have lasting effects, [professor Nina Thomas of NYU] said, such as paranoia, anxiety, hyper-vigilance and "the destruction of people's personalities." ... "Some of these [techniques] clearly have a very real physical component," said Dr. Allen Keller, director of the Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture. He cited waterboarding. ... A prisoner deprived of sleep may be overwhelmed with memories of torture when they become tired years later, Keller said. The same is true, he said, for the stomach growls of those tortured by starvation.
I'll go a step further. The problem isn't just that the techniques are physical. The problem is that the mind itself is physical. I just got back from a conference at Cambridge University sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation. In a series of seminars with neuroscientists and philosophers—among them, Chris Frith of University College London, Alva Noe of the University of California-Berkeley, and Fraser Watts of Cambridge—we explored how physiology, mental activity, and environmental conditions transform one another. You can't torture the mind without altering the brain. And since the brain is part of the body—in fact, the part of the body that most influences all the others—the marks you leave are pervasive. You can alter any physical process in which the mind is involved: sleep, eating, conversation, love, going out in public, or all of the above.
The U.S. military knows this. Its brochure for service members with post-traumatic stress disorder states:
PTSD is a condition that develops after someone has experienced a life-threatening situation, such as combat. In PTSD, the event must have involved actual or threatened death or serious injury and caused an emotional reaction involving intense fear, hopelessness, or horror. ... People who have PTSD have experiences from all three of these categories ["Re-experience the event over and over again," "Avoid people, places, or feelings that remind you of the event," and "Feel ‘keyed up' or on-edge all the time"] that stay with them most of the time and interfere with their ability to live their life or do their job.
I look forward to watching Bush's lawyers explain before Congress—and maybe the International Criminal Court—why this diagnosis doesn't apply to water-boarded detainees.
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When you need to torture a detainee, make sure you send in the right kind of expert: a psychologist.
In Saturday's Washington Post, Joby Warrick and Peter Finn report that the latest batch of Bush administration torture memos "show a steady stream of psychologists, physicians and other health officials who both kept detainees alive and actively participated in designing the interrogation program and monitoring its implementation." In particular:
An Aug. 1, 2002, memo said the CIA relied on its "on-site psychologists" for help in designing an interrogation program for Abu Zubaida and ultimately came up with a list of 10 methods drawn from a U.S. military training program known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, or SERE. That program, used to help prepare pilots to endure torture in the event they are captured, is loosely based on techniques that were used by the Communist Chinese to torture American prisoners of war. ... The CIA psychologists had personal experience with SERE and helped convince CIA officials that harsh tactics would coerce confessions from Abu Zubaida without inflicting permanent harm.
Note the reversal of purpose. SERE was developed to study torture methods so that our pilots could withstand them. But we came to understand these methods so well, and were so impressed by their efficacy, that we began applying them to our own detainees. Torture as a science led to torture as a technology. This often happens with expertise: We acquire it for one purpose but soon adapt it to another. In this case, the opposite purpose.
Warrick and Finn continue:
Waterboarding was touted as particularly useful because it was "reported to be almost 100 percent effective in producing cooperation," the memo said. The agency then used a psychological assessment of Abu Zubaida to find his vulnerable points. One of them, it turns out, was a severe aversion to bugs. "He appears to have a fear of insects," states the memo, which describes a plan to place a caterpillar or similar creature inside a tiny wooden crate in which Abu Zubaida was confined. CIA officials say the plan was never carried out.
Again, notice how easily expertise is turned upside down. Clinical psychology is customized to the patient. A therapist doesn't settle for general principles; she explores your particular fears. The point is to help you. But identifying fears is a skill, and it can just as easily be turned against you.
Interrogators were also told they could "exploit the detainee's fear of being seen naked" by women, according to the Post's Jeffrey Smith. Whatever you fear, we'll supply.
Most of the uproar over the torture memos focuses on the violence they condoned. But the purpose of interrogative torture isn't violence. It's cooperation. Cooperation is a mental act. I could slam your head against a wall, but that might get messy, and it might end up being difficult to explain to the Red Cross. I'd rather bypass your body and go straight to the organ that's refusing to cooperate: your brain. That's where the psychologist comes in. He tells me how to inflict unbearable anguish on you without requiring violence, or at least without leaving visible scars.
Even where violence is concerned, the targeted channel is psychological. Here's former CIA Director Michael Hayden explaining yesterday on Fox News Sunday why he opposed the release of the torture memos:
What we have described for our enemies in the midst of a war are the outer limits that any American would ever go to in terms of interrogating an al-Qaida terrorist. That's very valuable information. Now, it doesn't mean we would always go to those outer limits, but it describes the box within which Americans will not go beyond. To me, that's very useful for our enemies, even if, as a policy matter, this president at this time had decided not to use one, any, or all of those techniques.
In other words, the CIA wants detainees to live in terror of what we might do to them. Physically, we may have policies that bar us from hurting or maiming them in this or that way. But psychologically, we mustn't let them know this. We want to build a landscape of possible horrors in their imagination that's worse than the real thing.
Torture is mental. That's why the CIA used psychologists—and why investigations of the Bush torture program must go beyond the violence we actually applied.
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We've talked a lot in this blog about what happens when war, through remote-controlled drones, becomes more like a video game. But what happens when a video game becomes more like war?
Six Days in Fallujah, an interactive product being developed by Atomic Games, raises that question. Jamin Brophy-Warren explained the project in last week's Wall Street Journal:
The company sees it as a new kind of documentary. "For us, games are not just toys. If you look at how music, television and films have made sense of the complex issues of their times, it makes sense to do that with videogames," Mr. Tamte [Atomic's president] says. ... "Six Days," which uses actual events as its backdrop, is billed as having far deeper roots in reality and will be the first major game released about the ongoing war in Iraq. "We replicate a specific and accurate timeline—we mean six days literally," says Mr. Tamte. ... Atomic is working with more than three dozen soldiers who were in Fallujah, consulting thousands of photographs (some of which were mailed on memory cards from Camp Fallujah), and looking at classified satellite imagery to ensure that the game's appearance is faithful to the actual location.
The project's developers call it a "game-amentary." It sounds educational. But then a different kind of reality—commercial interest—intrudes on the documentary spin:
"Six Days" lacks one notable aspect of documentary: commentary. ... [T]hose involved in the new game said they didn't want to push a particular viewpoint and certainly weren't taking a stance on the morality of the invasion. "We're not trying to make social commentary. We're not pro-war. We're not trying to make people feel uncomfortable. We just want to bring a compelling entertainment experience," says Anthony Crouts, vice-president of marketing for Konami, the game's publisher. "At the end of the day, it's just a game."
Unless you think the battle of Fallujah was entertaining in real life, you can't make a video product about it that's both documentary and "just a game." Maybe someday, somebody will produce an interactive replica of the Iraq war. This doesn't sound like it.
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United Airlines has just implemented a tough policy for fat people: If you're too big to fit in a coach seat on a full plane, you'll have to pay for a first-class seat or two adjacent coach seats. And if those options are sold out, you'll be bumped from the flight.
I have a better idea: I'll sell you part of my seat.
More here.
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Sixteen million girls are missing in China. And now we know what happened to them: They were aborted because they weren't boys.
More here.
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Several days ago, we looked at "toilet to tap," the increasingly useful art of turning sewage into drinking water. Orange County, Calif., which is pioneering the practice, is proud to tell you how thoroughly its filtration purges the sewage: "Thousands of microfilters, hollow fibers covered in holes one-three-hundredth the width of a human hair, strain out suspended solids, bacteria and other materials."
But what if the water isn't what you want? What if you want the sewage?
Who would want these lovely "suspended solids," you ask? Why, you would. Apparently, they're a fine source of environmentally friendly fuel. Agence France Presse reports that in Oslo, Norway,
city officials soon plan to introduce buses that run on biofuels extracted from human waste. ... The biofuel, which is methane generated by fermenting sludge, will come from the Bekkelaget sewage treatment plant which handles waste from 250,000 city dwellers. "By going to the bathroom, a person produces the equivalent of eight litres (2.1 gallons) of diesel per year. That may not seem like a lot, but multiplied by 250,000 people, that is enough to operate 80 buses for 100,000 kilometres (62,000 miles) each," [one official] says.
Fecal fuel is, if you'll pardon the expression, green:
In addition to being carbon neutral, it emits 78 percent less nitrogen oxide and 98 percent fewer fine particles—two causes of respiratory illnesses—and is 92 percent less noisy. ... "If our entire fleet switched to biomethane, carbon dioxide emissions would be reduced by around 30,000 tonnes per year," according to [an Oslo official].
It protects the food supply:
Contrary to first generation bio-ethanol, made from grains and plants, biomethane has the added advantage of not impacting food supplies, nor does it require fertilisation or deplete precious water resources.
In other words, instead of turning corn into fuel, which prevents you from eating the corn, we should feed you the corn first and then collect your droppings so that your sustenance becomes part of the fuel production process.
And it's cheap:
All included, the cost of producing biofuel equivalent to one litre of diesel comes to 0.72 euros (98 cents), while diesel at the pump in Norway currently costs more than 1.0 euro.
In fact, as a fuel supplier, maybe you should get a cut of the savings. Remember that pilot project in India I mentioned last year? The one where villagers get paid to use public toilets while their urine is tested for use as a fertilizer? At the time, I proposed that
we could try our own version of the Indian experiment. To do that, we'd need to devise an efficient method of converting public-toilet waste into something productive, such as fertilizer, without endangering public health. ... I bet somebody will figure out pretty soon how to monetize toilet waste. ... Restaurant grease [is] being illegally siphoned from filthy bins and barrels. Bandits are selling it for conversion to biodiesel. When bandits start siphoning public toilets, maybe governments will wake up and get in on the action. And you'll stop having to pay.
Nine months later, Oslo may have worked out the last piece of the puzzle. You go to the bathroom. We filter the excrement from the water. We recycle the water so you can drink it again. Meanwhile, we turn the excrement into fuel. All of this helps the environment, protects the food supply and saves money. And if you play it right, you get paid.
Anyone got a problem with this?
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The food police are closing in on their next target: a soda tax.
Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, they propose a penny-per-ounce excise tax on "sugared beverages." That's nearly $3 per case. Why so much? Because this tax, unlike the petty junk-food taxes of yesteryear, is designed to hurt. Its purpose is to discourage you from buying soda, on the grounds that soda, like smoking, is bad for you.
More here.
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Can a drug cure the urge to steal?
It looks that way. In the April 1 issue of Biological Psychiatry, scientists from the University of Minnesota School of Medicine report:
An 8-week, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial was conducted to evaluate the safety and efficacy of oral naltrexone for kleptomania. Twenty-five individuals with DSM-IV kleptomania were randomized to naltrexone (dosing ranging from 50 mg/day to 150 mg/day) or placebo. ... Subjects assigned to naltrexone had significantly greater reductions in ... stealing urges (p = .032), and stealing behavior (p < .001) compared with subjects on placebo. Subjects assigned to naltrexone also had greater improvement in overall kleptomania severity ... Naltrexone demonstrated statistically significant reductions in stealing urges and behavior in kleptomania.
It sounds like an April Fools' joke. But it isn't. In an interview with Reuters, the study's lead author explains that naltrexone "gets rid of that rush and desire" to steal.
Naltrexone is better known as a drug for alcohol or drug addiction. Many of us, while accepting these addictions as diseases, continue to regard theft as a matter of personal responsibility. Should we rethink that distinction? If the same drug relieves both conditions, should we take kleptomania more seriously as an illness?
The floor's open.
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The naked body scanners are taking over.
When we first checked in on them two years ago, the scanners, which see through clothing, were being deployed at a single airport. ... TSA assured us that the scanners would be used only as a "voluntary alternative" to "a more invasive physical pat-down during secondary screening." Only a few passengers, the ones selected for extra scrutiny, would face the scanners. The rest of us could walk through the metal detectors and board our planes.
Surprise! TSA has revised its position. Everyone will face the see-through machines. Anyone who objects will "undergo metal detector screening and a pat-down." Show us your body, or we'll feel you up.
More here.
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Why do poor kids have more trouble in school? Is it due to environment or biology?
The answer, according to a new study, may be both.
We tend to think of biological explanations as an alternative to environmental explanations. The clearest example of this conflict is the debate over genetic theories of intelligence. But biology is more than genetics. It includes physical processes that are environmentally influenced. So if poverty causes cognitive impairment, biology should be able to explain part of the effect.
That's what a study published last week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences tries to do. Working with a sample of nearly 200 children, the authors set out to identify "underlying biological mechanisms that may account for the income-achievement gap." But instead of looking for genes, they look for a different kind of mechanism: measurable stress.
And they find it. "Childhood poverty no longer predicts young adults' working memory capacity once chronic stress exposure is partialed from the covariance between childhood poverty and adult working memory," they report. In other words, stress is the missing link. They conclude:
One, we demonstrate that the duration of childhood poverty is related prospectively to working memory performance later in life among young adults. Two, we show that allostatic load, an index of chronic stress, conveys a significant proportion of the covariation between childhood deprivation and an adult's working memory performance. The longer the period of childhood poverty, the higher the levels of allostatic load during childhood, and the greater the reductions in young adults' subsequent working memory. Furthermore, elevated childhood allostatic load predicts working memory in young adults and, in turn, largely explains the prospective relationship between childhood poverty and these working memory deficits.
In an interview with Rob Stein of the Washington Post, the study's lead author enumerates various ways in which poverty can cause stress: "You may have housing problems. You may have more conflict in the family. There's a lot more pressure in paying the bills. You'll probably end up moving more often."
This study alone doesn't settle anything. It hasn't monitored cognitive performance over time, doesn't measure performance beyond working memory, and doesn't rule out other underlying factors. But it shows how biological and environmental explanations can help each other. And that's an important lesson in a field too often polarized between the two.
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If the government stopped you from bearing a child, would you buy one instead?
Before you say no, look at what's happening in China, as reported by Andrew Jacobs in the New York Times:
The Chinese government insists there are fewer than 2,500 cases of human trafficking each year, a figure that includes both women and children. But advocates for abducted children say there may be hundreds of thousands. Sun Haiyang, whose son disappeared in 2007, has collected a list of 2,000 children in and around Shenzhen who have disappeared in the past two years.
Where are all these kids going?
[M]ost of the boys are purchased domestically by families desperate for a male heir, parents of abducted children and some law enforcement officials who have investigated the matter say. The demand is especially strong in rural areas of south China, where a tradition of favoring boys over girls and the country's strict family planning policies have turned the sale of stolen children into a thriving business.
The family-planning policy fines most couples who bear more than one child:
[I]n many rural areas, including Anxi County, a resident whose first child is a daughter is allowed to have a second. Having a third child, however, can mean steep fines as high as $5,800 and other penalties that include the loss of a breadwinner's job. A boy, by contrast, can often be bought for half that amount, and authorities may turn a blind eye if the child does not need to be registered as a new birth in the locale. In some cases, local officials may even encourage people desperate for a son to buy one. After their 3-month-old son died, Zhou Xiuqin said, the village family planning official went to her home and tried to comfort her and her husband, who was compelled to have a vasectomy after the birth of the boy, their second child. "He said, ‘Don't cry, stop crying, you can always buy another one,' " Ms. Zhou recalled.
And that's just what the couple did. They bought a 5-year-old boy for $3,500.
This is what happens when you block legal access to what people desperately want: You create a black market. That's true of drugs, abortions, and even children. The black-market problem doesn't settle any of these policy questions. But before deciding on the policy, you had better take it into account.
Some Chinese parents are trying to defeat the human traffickers by catching kidnappers on surveillance video. Other activists are "agitating for the establishment of a DNA database for children." One activist tells Jacobs, "If the government can launch satellites and catch spies, they can figure out how to find stolen children."
Can a totalitarian regime of cameras, DNA databases, and forced vasectomies stop a black market in children? I don't know. But it sure can start one.
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Car dealers can now disable your vehicle via satellite if you miss a payment. Is that a bad thing?
Jonathan Welsh explains the technology in the Wall Street Journal. It consists of a "disabler" wired into your ignition, plus an optional "satellite-based locator" that can help repo men find the car. Don Lavoie, president of a company that markets the devices, says sales were up 25 percent last year and are on track to double this year.
Sounds like Big Brother, right? Welsh reports that
consumer-advocacy groups such as the Consumer Federation of America say the devices represent a disturbing new layer of surveillance. ... John Van Alst, a lawyer with the National Consumer Law Center, calls the practice of remote disabling "electronic repossession" and says it represents a kind of intimidation, as well as creating extra hassles for people who are already financially strapped. "These devices are effective because of the threat they represent," says Mr. Van Alst.
Car dealers and disabler makers answer these charges in three ways. First, you owe them money. If you don't pay it, they have the right to deprive you of what you were paying for. Your car should be like your cell phone: If you stop paying, it stops working.
I like this argument. It's simple. Cars, like phones, can now be wirelessly connected. Why should they be treated differently? No quid, no quo.
Second, when a dealer knows he can shut down your car if you don't pay, he's more willing to let you drive the car off the lot. According to Welsh: "In the past, many dealers weren't willing to take the risk of extending credit to certain customers. But Mr. Lavoie and dealers who have installed his company's disabler say more buyers do pay on time when they have the devices in their cars." As a result, the technology "helps a broader range of customers qualify for loans."
Lavoie is right. This is what too many civil libertarians fail to appreciate about remote surveillance and control: The ability to exert power from a distance reduces the need to exert it up close. And the ability to exert it in the future reduces the need to exert it now. I can let you drive this car off the lot right now because I know that if you don't pay as promised, I can shut it off.
One driver likens her disabler to "those ankle bracelets they put on you when you've done something bad." It's an instructive analogy. GPS ankle bracelets are an alternative to confinement. If we can track you and detain you, we don't have to keep you locked up. The longer the leash, the greater your freedom.
Third, the disabler industry says its technology "helps financially strapped customers change their ways for the better." Lavoie calls it "a behavior-modification method."
Behavior modification? You're going to put a remote-controlled disabler in my car to make me a better person?
If the dealers and device makers were serious about that, you'd have reason to be frightened. Fortunately, they aren't. They don't care whether you're a good person. They don't care whether you kick your dog, cheat on your spouse, or steal from your employer. The only thing they care about is getting your payment on time. That's the beauty of capitalism: It keeps invasive technology in the hands of people who, aside from their self-interest, lack motivation to mess with your life. When the people behind the satellites start caring about your character, that's when it's time to freak out.
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It's been a year or so since we checked in on "toilet to tap," the increasingly useful art of turning sewage into drinking water. Actually, you aren't supposed to call it "toilet to tap." That's a slur coined by political opponents of the technology. And it's highly effective, as evidenced by the fact that I've probably grossed you out already.
The technology's proponents constantly labor to explain how sanitary it is. Their latest attempt, via Reuters, focuses on Orange County's "Groundwater Replenishment System":
Anyone who has visited Disneyland recently and taken a sip from a drinking fountain there may have unknowingly sampled a taste of the future—a small quantity of water that once flowed through a sewer. ... The plant takes pre-treated sewer water that otherwise would be discharged to the ocean and runs it through a three-step cleansing process—essentially the same technology used to purify baby food and bottled water. Thousands of microfilters, hollow fibers covered in holes one-three-hundredth the width of a human hair, strain out suspended solids, bacteria and other materials. The water then passes to a reverse osmosis system, where it is forced through semi-permeable membranes that filter out smaller contaminants, including salts, viruses and pesticides. Reverse osmosis also is the main process used in desalination. Finally, the water is disinfected with a mix of ultraviolet light and hydrogen peroxide. The resulting product exceeds all U.S. drinking standards but gets additional filtration when it is allowed to percolate back into the ground to replenish the aquifer.
Well, that sounds pretty clean. But I bet you're still not convinced. You'd rather stick to the familiar crap-free water that already comes from your tap.
Surprise! That familiar water isn't so crap-free after all. And proponents of the new technology are happy to tell you so:
They want the public to understand that much of what comes from the tap today is recycled sewer water. The Colorado River, for example, contains large amounts of heavily treated waste discharged from cities upstream, including Las Vegas. As the L.A. County Economic Development Corp study puts it, "What happens in Vegas doesn't stay in Vegas."
Great line. And it's smart politics: If you can't sell the public on the purity of your own candidate, attack the other side's candidate. We're used to this tactic when the candidates are people like John McCain and Barack Obama. But it works just as well when the candidates are groundwater replenishment and old-fashioned tap water.
And just because this is a political attack doesn't mean it's false. For my money, it's true. We already drink toilet-to-tap water. That's the nature of water: It cycles from one form to another. Urine evaporates, rain falls, rivers flow. If you think you've never consumed water that came from excrement, you must literally be living on another planet.
So stop freaking out about where your water came from, and start focusing on the quality of its filtration. Everything is recycled, including you.
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Homosexuality isn't a sin or mental illness. It needs no cure. In most cases, it's deeply ingrained and probably inborn. If you try to change your sexual orientation, you're more likely to end up at war with yourself than at peace. For these reasons, any systematic program to turn gay people straight, such as "reparative therapy," is futile and dangerous.
But therapy isn't about the big picture. It's about lots of little pictures: the worlds unique to each of us. You and I may have the same sexual orientation, but our lives are very different. You know nothing of my family, my religion, or my community. You don't even know how straight or gay I am. If I tell my therapist that I'd rather try to modify my feelings than give up my faith or my marriage, who are you to second-guess her or me?
More here.