Civility is at the very heart of civilization. Those two words, along with other words such as “city” and “citizen,” come from the Latin civitas, which means a body of citizens bound by common laws and rules. In other words, civilized people agree to be nice to each other. Think of how both you and the cashier usually say “thank you” when you buy your morning coffee, even if you’re complete strangers. Getting along in modern life would be impossible without at least passable manners.
Which brings us to today’s Regulation of the Day. La Toba, Spain’s mayor, Julian Altienza Garcia recently issued a 65-plank Courtesy Charter making it illegal to commit tactless acts in public from burping to slurping soup. To this writer’s knowledge, La Torba does not have a reputation as a bastion of barbarity.
The charter even contains a mandate of sorts — children are required to spend some time with their grandparents on a regular basis. It is not known how Spain’s Supreme Court would rule if they were to decide on the grandparent mandate’s legality.
Some of the other offenses include:
- Nosepicking;
- Touching your genitals;
- Flatulence;
- Yawning without covering your mouth;
- Coughing without covering your mouth; and
- Talking with your mouth full
None of these breaches of decorum are punishable beyond a dirty look and a wag of the finger. People convicted of other minor offenses will, however, be able to have their fines waived if they take etiquette courses. Mayor Garcia defends his Courtesy Charter, saying “It is a compendium of basic rules of politeness that are being lost and should not be forgotten.”
He’s right that manners are important. They shouldn’t be forgotten. And it certainly is useful to have a written etiquette primer. In fact, many already exist. You can look here, here, here, and here, for starters. But even if Mayor Garcia’s job description is as broad as he believes it to be, his constituents would be better served if he turned his attention to more pressing matters than other peoples’ boogers.
You’re just a lab rat to be socially re-engineered by activist judges and lawyers — who think they know how to run your life better than you do — or a chump to be fleeced for lawyers’ enrichment. That’s the message some law professors apparently instill in students at Howard University: “At Howard, they tell us as soon as we get there, ‘If you’re going to be a lawyer, you’re either a social engineer or a parasite on society,’” a student at Howard declared. “That’s how I think about life, is to be a social engineer.” (Although Howard University is nominally “private” and thus not accountable to taxpayers, it is directly “funded by the U.S. Government, which gives approximately $235 million annually” to it in special appropriations.)
Promoting social engineering by lawyers (through “institutional-reform” lawsuits brought by left-wing lawyers and law-school clinics) is a bad idea. Left-wing law professors are a bossy lot: some want to ban conservative or politically-incorrect speech as “hostile-environment harassment,” control what you eat and drink, control your sex life (they view heterosexual sex as patriarchal and thus “consensual rape”), raise your taxes through state-court decrees ordering increased funding of government programs, and take away your property (and your children, if you home-school them). They also often lack common sense, or a grasp of certain basic realities of life. One of my professors at Harvard Law School was notorious among his colleagues for behaving as if on drugs. Another of my professors, the radical Duncan Kennedy, who was so prominent and respected among law professors that he was called the “Pope” of the “Critical Legal Studies” movement, advocated rotating the law professors and the janitors into each others’ jobs. (The janitors liked the idea of being paid like law professors, but had no interest in teaching law, and thought Kennedy’s idea was flaky. Kennedy himself was married to a wealthy heiress, and did not need a law professor’s handsome salary to live on. America would be better off being run by Harvard Law School’s modest, hard-working janitors than by its mostly left-wing law professors.)
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Last week, the Media Research Center’s Dan Gainor wrote a nice article examining how the mainstream media has been complicit in smearing lean finely textured beef — what critics are calling “pink slime.” “ABC has covered the story almost round the clock in recent weeks with stories on ‘World News with Diane Sawyer’ and ‘Good Morning America’,” Gainor reported. Versions of the story have been picked up by dozens of major and minor newspapers around the country. And most television and radio news programs have covered it as well.
On Sunday, however, The New York Times‘s Andrew Revkin became what appears to be the first major media figure to debunk the misinformation campaign in a blog post entitled, “Why I’m O.K. with ‘Pink Slime’ in Ground Beef.”
I agree with Texas Gov. Rick Perry on something — the nutritional merits of derided “pink slime” — the processed last scrapings of meat and connective tissue after cattle are butchered. Dude, it is indeed beef — a source of low-fat nutrition.
One of Revkin’s sources, a historian and blogger named Maureen Ogle, explains the issue well:
“First a word about PS: It’s beef, people. Plain ol’ beef. It’s created by using a deboning process that removes every last morsel of flesh from beef carcasses. During the cutting, slivers and bits of bone end up with the beef, but those are reduced to mush in the processing that follows. … In the BEEF industry, its use dates back to the mid-1970s, although poultry and fish processors were already using the technique. Beef packers began using in the in mid-seventies because, at the time, all meat prices, but especially beef, were in the stratosphere. … So pushed by consumers on one side, and soaring costs on the other, meatpackers asked for, and got, permission from the USDA to use a “mechanical deboning” process that allowed them scrape meat off carcasses so that what had been waste could be eaten.”
Although critics are calling pink slime an unsafe food additive that ought to require mandatory labeling wherever it appears, the fact of the matter is, lean finely textured beef is exactly that: beef. And, compared to other ground beef, LFTB is probably better for consumers. It is processed in a way that removes much of the fat — thus the “lean” part of its name. And beginning around the early- to mid-1990s, following a foodborne illness outbreak linked to Jack in the Box hamburgers, processors began treating LFTB with tiny amounts of the common food disinfectant ammonium hydroxide to kill germs, thereby substantially reducing consumers’ exposure to foodborne pathogens.
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It can be hard for parents, but they need to tell their kids “no” from time to time. Letting children know that they can’t always get what they want is an important lesson in life. In Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood, not all parents are up to the task.
Across the country, ice cream vendors will stroll through parks in the summer months; they go where ice cream trucks dare not tread. A lot of their sales are to kids. And parents know what happens when you get between a kid and ice cream: screaming, wailing, and gnashing of teeth are only the beginning. It isn’t fun.
That’s why some Park Slope parents want to ban ice cream vendors from parks. One parent wrote on a message board, “I should not have to fight with my children every warm day on the playground just so someone can make a living!”
One sees where her priorities are in these hard economic times.
This being Brooklyn, there is another wrinkle. The New York Post reports:
But Sarah Schenck says just say no to frozen confections.
Schenck, a mother of two and co-founder of the eco-friendly parentearth.com, said statistics back her up.
“Nobody wants to be a crank, but one in three kids are going to be obese or diabetic by high school,” she said. “When my kids see other kids get ice cream, they just start begging me. I just don’t think these are the fights we should be having.”
Most people have more nuanced views than Schenck; everything in moderation and all that. But there are people who think like her, and they are not afraid to use regulation to get their way. We should tell them no.
Provisions are being added to the 1994 Violence Against Women Act that could undermine due process on campus and in criminal cases, as civil liberties groups like the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and civil libertarians like former ACLU board member Wendy Kaminer have noted. The changes are contained in a reauthorization of the Act that is likely to pass the Senate over objections from some Republican senators like Charles Grassley of Iowa, who has also objected to the lack of safeguards against fraud in the law and the misuse of millions of dollars in taxpayer money. (Even if the Senate’s reauthorization does not pass the House, programs set up by the 1994 law will continue to operate.)
William Creeley of FIRE, and Wendy Kaminer, say that the Senate reauthorization would effectively result in a form of double jeopardy for accused students. Moreover, they point out, it could implicitly reinforce Education Department “guidance” demanding that colleges water down due process protections in campus disciplinary proceedings (a demand criticized by lawyers like Robert Smith, Jennifer Braceras, Ilya Shapiro, and Harvey Silverglate; leading law professor and former University of Chicago law dean Richard Epstein; the American Association of University Professors; and many civil libertarians and journalists. I am a former Education Department attorney who practiced education law for years, and I discussed why the Education Department’s guidance was legally unjustified under Title IX and federal court rulings here, here, here, here, here, and here).
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No sooner had Rep. Paul Ryan unveiled his new budget proposal than liberals were howling in rage and righteous indignation. What was it that infuriated them so? James Pethokoukis at The American gives a clue when he compared Ryan’s budgetary approach with the president’s:
Ryan’s Path to Prosperity would cut the growth in Medicaid spending by $770 billion over ten years vs. President Obama’s budget, still spending $3.5 trillion overall on the program. Ryan would convert the federal share of Medicaid spending into a block grant to the states – indexed for inflation and population growth — giving them the flexibility to design programs that best suit their needs. He would also convert the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program into a block grant indexed for inflation and eligibility beginning in 2016 and make aid contingent on work or job training. There is also a goal of “devolving other low-income assistance programs to the states.” The goal here isn’t just to cut spending growth, but to create a culture of empowerment rather than dependency.
It is, of course, this desire to create a culture of “empowerment rather than dependency” that is the driving factor behind Ryan’s entitlement reform plans. And it is this desire that has aroused the ire of the left, who reside in a twisted world where “dependence” is synonymous with “moral.” Take Jonathan Cohn, who in a New Republic piece, “The Stunning Immorality of Paul Ryan’s Budget,” writes that Ryan’s effort to “strengthen the safety net” through structural reform is “morally bankrupt.”
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The Economist hits the nail on the head — albeit a nail that has been well hit by many in the free market movement already. In the latest issue, they correctly observe that an ailing economy presents a golden opportunity to roll back economic restrictions and increase liberty. Whether it’s gambling, alcohol, or another “sin” product or service, the case for easing restrictions on the sale and consumption of these “vices” is very tempting, in particular if the case can be made that such changes will increase potential tax revenue and/or create jobs.
As those who follow my weekly “Alcohol Regulation Roundup” series may have noticed, the “good” news has increased with each passing month. Southern states are trying to make it easier for brewers to operate, Northeastern states are increasing the hours and days liquor stores can operate, and dozens of states are considering privatizing state-run alcohol distribution or sales. It isn’t just alcohol; gambling is a booming industry in more and more states. Some are increasing the places allowed to offer slots and another dozen states are considering legislation to legalize online gambling, casinos, or slots. We’ve even seen some smoking bans overturned! But with the economy heading towards a much needed recovery, there’s still a lot more work to do. As noted in the Economist article:
…despite all these initiatives, many parts of America are still lumbered with a bizarre and complex array of restrictions on drinking, gambling and the like that seem entirely out of keeping with a country that proudly calls itself the land of the free. Even after Washington leaves the club, 17 states will still maintain a government monopoly on either the sale or distribution of spirits, or both …There are over 4,000 state and federal laws concerning alcohol, says Mr Coleman of DISCUS, and another 1,900 were proposed in 2008 alone. Rules about gambling are an equally perverse mix. Only 12 states have no casinos of any sort. But several more allow them only on boats or at racetracks. Another 12 limit gambling to Indian reservations. And four states still ban fireworks of all kinds.
Yes, this expansion of liberty is the silver lining of a terribly rough economic depression. And it’s a silver lining that very likely will last into the economic recovery. Sure, with more people back to work and fewer complaining there will be a smaller number of legislators keen on expanding alcohol or gambling in their state. However, the work done by state-based and national groups such as DISCUS, The Brewers Association, Free The Hops, OpenTheTaps, CEI, The Mackinac Center for Public Policy, The Commonwealth Foundation, the Washington Policy Center, and many others will not be forgotten. We have shown that people want more freedom, choices, and better service. We have shown that liberty really does increase wealth, and enlightened many lawmakers to the idea of free market enterprise. So long as we keep chipping away at the roadblocks, we can continue to increase consumer and business freedom — regardless of the economic atmosphere.
Steven Pogue, 64, was cited by police for flipping the bird while driving in Ballwin, Missouri. He was exonerated on free speech grounds, and the city is now moving to repeal the law.
Such impolite behavior is par for the course in New York City, among other places. Should such rude people find themselves in a certain part of eastern Missouri, they now have nothing to fear.
The ordinance in question prohibits motorists from extending body parts outside vehicle windows. It was intended more to prevent people from sticking their legs out of windows than to discourage profanity, though at least one officer thought the ordinance also applied to middle fingers.
Your mild-mannered correspondent has also, admittedly, been known to let loose now and then. Usually it’s while in pain, though the D.C. area’s spectacularly inept drivers do occasionally draw my ire. But should linguistic decorum be a matter of law? In this case, discretion should be the better part of valor.
A local ACLU spokeswoman comments that “Repealing the law fits within our nation’s finest traditions of allowing free expressions without fear of arrest.” Right on.
Similar cases have been successfully fought in Philadelphia, and with less success in Milwaukee.
A New Jersey jury has convicted Dharun Ravi of hate crimes in the Tyler Clementi case, which created a furor over bullying that led to legislation that endangers free speech on campus, and helped spawn a thriving “anti-bullying” industry that has enriched opportunistic consultants and self-proclaimed experts. Ravi, a Rutgers University student, surreptitiously filmed his gay college roommate, Tyler Clementi, kissing another man. Clementi committed suicide two days later. Initial media accounts falsely claimed that Ravi had filmed Clementi having sex, not just kissing, and sensationalized the case through factual exaggerations. Press reports also jumped to conclusions about the mental state of Ravi and Clementi, and falsely made it sound like there were gaps in existing law that somehow facilitated Ravi’s mistreatment of Clementi. (In reality, Rutgers, like most colleges, enforces rules against sexual and sexual orientation harassment, and New Jersey state law forbids invasions of privacy, and holds colleges liable for negligently failing to respond to anti-gay harassment committed by students, as a 2007 ruling by the New Jersey Supreme Court made clear.)
Jurors convicted Ravi of hate crimes without making any finding that he was motivated by hate, argues Jacob Sullum at Reason magazine, in a commentary entitled, “Did Dharun Ravi Commit a Hateless Hate Crime?” Prosecutors did not allege at trial that Ravi’s actions, which Clementi himself dismissively referred to as a brief “five sec peep,” actually drove Clementi to commit suicide, and Ravi’s lawyers were denied access to key writings by Clementi that might have revealed other factors contributing to the suicide. Jurors did find that Clementi “reasonably perceived” himself to have been targeted for intimidation based on his sexual orientation. Law Professor Ann Althouse says that it “sounds like Ravi was found guilty because he couldn’t disprove a motivation that was inferred based on Clementi’s subjective perception. And yet the defense was deprived of much of the evidence of Clementi’s subjective state of mind.” (Note that Ravi wrote to Clementi that he had a close friend who was gay.)
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Earlier today, Nicole Ciandella linked to an essay by the John Locke Foundation’s Fergus Hodgson, titled “The Absurdity of Raw Milk Prohibition.” It’s a good piece, worth reading. But Hodgson makes a couple of errors worth pointing out, so I thought I’d add my two cents.
Hodgson begins well enough:
“Picture a peaceful, Amish farmer, selling one of nature’s super foods — fresh, raw milk. Eager customers came from afar, even across state lines, to savor the taste and access a nutritious product. Who could oppose such harmonious commerce on Rainbow Acres Farm? Government officials and their enforcers, that’s who.
This Pennsylvania farmer has been the subject of a yearlong sting operation, which included stealth purchases and a 5 a.m. surprise inspection. In February, a federal judge imposed a permanent injunction that prohibited him from selling his milk across state lines.”
So far, so good. But then Hodgson makes an error of over-simplification: “To defend this violation of freedom of choice, proponents claim to be protecting others from the purported dangers of raw milk. But this claim is laughable, since evidence to the contrary has been mounting for decades.”
As I’ve written on occasion, the health risks associated with raw milk consumption are generally quite low, at least for adults with a healthy immune system. But they’re not zero. After all, pasteurization was seen as a remarkable scientific breakthrough and public health miracle for a reason: raw milk can harbor any number of nasty bacteria – including S. typhimurium, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, E. coli O157:H7, Listeria, Campylobacter, and Brucella – which historically have had a nasty tendency to result in illness and, occasionally, death.
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