Today is the fourth working day of the new year. The Federal Register is already over 1,000 pages long.
At this rate, the 2010 Federal Register will hit 63,187 pages. This is an improvement over 2009, when it reached 69,676 pages. In 2008, it was 79,435 pages.
Accuweather’s meteorologist Joe Bastardi has a new video titled “Worldwide Cold not Seen Since 70s Ice Age Scare.” Bastardi points out that the frigid conditions affecting significant parts of the world today – North America, Europe, and Asia – are very similar to the patterns in the 1970s, when fears of a new Ice Age were hyped by the media. He repeatedly compares maps of the cold spots from January 1-10, 1977 and current ones and notes the strong similarities:
Here’s what we had then, here’s what we have now. Then, now. Then, now.
In referring to the current global warming alarms, Bastardi asks:
How could this be global warming, but 34 years ago, that was an Ice Age coming?
Good question.
Sometimes, when two regulations love each other very much, they get together and have little baby regulations. This is happening right now in Britain.
Full body scans are coming into use at many UK airport security checkpoints. Since screeners essentially see all passengers naked, the scans run afoul of child protection laws for passengers under 18.
The thought of pedophiles using the body scan images for their own sick ends is decidedly creepy. So the British government is taking steps to keep that from happening. Those steps include:
-Exempting everyone under 18 from being scanned. This defeats the security purpose of the scanners.
-Moving the scanner operators out of sight of passengers. That keeps the scanner images anonymous. But it doesn’t prevent perverts from seeing things they shouldn’t.
There is an easier way: don’t do full body scans. They do more to make people feel safe than to actually make them safe.
Reinforced cockpit doors, proactive passengers, and checked baggage screening are much more effective. And they’re already in place. Besides, terrorist attacks are rare. Full-body scans are an over-reaction. The resources spent on them have other, better uses.
The D.C. government sometimes has more empathy for criminals than for their victims. In December 2007, the D.C. Council voted to turn ex-cons into a protected class.
Now, it turns out that serial rapists are roaming free in the District of Columbia, since “Three thousand untested rape kits are sitting in a warehouse,” and D.C. has not even set up its own crime lab to nab rapists and other criminals using their DNA.
The D.C. Council hasn’t done anything about that. But in December 2007, it voted to curtail employers’ and landlord’s freedom of association by banning job and housing discrimination against ex-cons, even though there’s a huge difference between discriminating based on someone’s skin color, and judging them based on the “content of their character.” Even the Washington Post opposed the bill, noting that it “would undermine public safety.”
A Washington, D.C. law called the D.C. Human Rights Act also bans employers, including ideological and political organizations, from using political affiliation as a hiring criterion, or even adopting neutral policies that have an inadvertent “disparate impact” based on such criteria (with a completely different, and radically broader, definition of “disparate impact” than federal law). Such mandates are of dubious constitutionality. Contrary to the D.C. Council’s apparent belief, the government’s power to ban employers from engaging in reasonable job-related “discrimination” is not infinite. See Nelson v. McClatchy Newspapers, 936 P.2d 1123 (Wash. 1997) (First Amendment barred application of state law holding newspaper liable for discharging reporter based on political activities).
Married parents don’t have any legal obligation to pay for their adult children’s college education or living expenses. But a bill just introduced in Virginia’s legislature would require divorced parents to pay for such expenses.
HB 146 would extend child support beyond age 18 to age 23 when the “child” is attending college. Right now, child support in Virginia usually ends soon after the child reaches the age of majority.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down a similar provision mandating post-majority support as a violation of the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause. It reasoned that since married parents do not have to support their adult children, it was discriminatory to force divorced parents to do so. See Curtis v. Kline, 666 A.2d 265 (Pa. 1995) (Courts have apparently split over the constitutionality of such requirements).
I agree with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s reasoning, on principle. Married parents in Virginia generally have no duty to support their college-age children. Thus, neither should divorced parents.
But I also oppose this requirement based on my experience as a lawyer. (I should note, by the way, that I am not divorced, and have no child support obligations.)
As an intake lawyer for a non-profit law firm for over 6 years, I saw cases of aging divorced parents forced to pay the college bills of ungrateful offspring with whom they had an acrimonious relationship, even though they could ill-afford to do so – like a father dying of incurable liver disease forced to pay his estranged daughter’s graduate school expenses, under a state law permitting child support to be awarded for adult children. (We did not handle family-law cases in state court and I thus had no choice but to reject these people’s pleas for legal assistance.)
Divorced parents, like married parents, should have the right not to pay for their adult children’s living expenses or college costs — for example, if the child engages in conduct or a field of study that is objectionable to the parent.
It is an unfortunate reality that courts are likely to apply this bill, if it is enacted and not struck down, in a way that results in support obligations that are inequitable to some aging parents. Virginia courts have sometimes awarded support even in situations where statutory language would appear to bar any support. For example, in Calvin v. Calvin, 31 Va. App. 181 (1999), the Virginia Court of Appeals awarded spousal support, even though the recipient had engaged in adultery and been “vindictive and cruel” in the court’s own words, and even though Virginia’s statutes expressly bar support to adulterous spouses absent a finding of “manifest injustice” under both economic and fault-based factors. Additional examples are given here.
Certain influential forces in the environmental movement – most notably James Hansen of NASA – have expressed disquiet with the inability of democracies to deal with their imagined “climate crisis,” leading to sentiments like this one from Australian authors David Shearman and Joseph Wayne Smith:
We need an authoritarian form of government in order to implement the scientific consensus on greenhouse gas emissions
Climatologists Nico Stehr and Hans von Storch discuss this argument at Roger Pielke Jr’s blog. Thankfully, the demands for an “Ecologocracy,” for want of a better term, are not yet universal in the environmental movement. They conclude:
Finally, the growing impatience of prominent climate researchers constitutes an implicit embrace of now popular social theories. We think in this context especially of Jared Diamond’s theories on the fate of human societies. Diamond argues that only those societies have a chance of survival which practice sustainable lifestyles. Climate researchers have evidently been impressed by Diamond’s deterministic social theory. However, they have drawn the wrong conclusion, namely that only authoritarian political states guided by scientists make effective and correct decisions on the climate issue. History teaches us that the opposite is the case.
Therefore, today’s China cannot serve as a model. Climate policy must be compatible with democracy, otherwise the threat to civilization will be much more than just changes to our physical environment.
Indeed. In fact, there may be another reason for those who despise greenhouse gas emissions also to despise democracy. and it is precisely linked to the threat to civilization. We know that the best indicator of low greenhouse gas emissions is poverty. As Daron Acemoglu shows, rejecting Diamond, poverty is strongly linked to the lack of market institutions that democracy protects:
People need incentives to invest and prosper; they need to know that if they work hard, they can make money and actually keep that money. And the key to ensuring those incentives is sound institutions — the rule of law and security and a governing system that offers opportunities to achieve and innovate. That’s what determines the haves from the have-nots — not geography or weather or technology or disease or ethnicity.
Put simply: Fix incentives and you will fix poverty. And if you wish to fix institutions, you have to fix governments.
To put it another way, the authoritarian solution to the global warming problem, in so far as it exists, is the imposition of poverty, for that is the inevitable result of the restriction of energy use that is the authoritarians’ sine qua non. Those of us who are trying to think of alternative solutions to the problem, however, are convinced that it is the same institutions that have delivered us from poverty that will deliver us from whatever ills a warmer world might impose. To see more on this, check out Marlo Lewis’ film Policy Peril, in particular this segment.
The state of Maine and the city of San Francisco are considering requiring warning labels for cell phones.
Perhaps some warning labels are in order. After all, few things are more annoying than people SPEAKING AS LOUDLY AS POSSIBLE INTO THEIR PHONE ABOUT WHAT’S FOR DINNER when a normal tone of voice will do.
But these warning labels have nothing to do with letting people know that their phones can make them look like jackasses.
No, the labels warn the credulous that their phones emit electromagnetic radiation. Otherwise known as light waves. Some people believe that this causes brain cancer.
Brain atrophy, maybe. But cancer? Most studies have found no correlation, let alone causation.
Something else to consider: the demographic group far and away most prone to brain cancer is also far and away the least likely to use cell phones – the elderly.
Hmm.
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