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@DanRothschild accurately sums up Mayor Bloomberg latest statist escapade.

Mayor Bloomberg wants to ban the sale of large-sized sugary drinks–that is greater than 16 ounces.

New York City plans to enact a far-reaching ban on the sale of large sodas and other sugary drinks at restaurants, movie theaters and street carts, in the most ambitious effort yet by the Bloomberg administration to combat rising obesity.

The proposed ban would affect virtually the entire menu of popular sugary drinks found in delis, fast-food franchises and even sports arenas, from energy drinks to pre-sweetened iced teas. The sale of any cup or bottle of sweetened drink larger than 16 fluid ounces — about the size of a medium coffee, and smaller than a common soda bottle — would be prohibited under the first-in-the-nation plan, which could take effect as soon as next March.

The measure would not apply to diet sodas, fruit juices, dairy-based drinks like milkshakes, or alcoholic beverages; it would not extend to beverages sold in grocery or convenience stores.

I sometimes ponder whether Mayor Bloomberg sits around in a sinister statist board room—reminiscent of the Springfield Republican Party, led by the nefarious Mr. Burns—conjuring and hatching up new plans to enrage libertarians and make me write irate blog posts. Well, whatever he’s doing, it’s working! See all these Bloomberg posts I wrote! More exclamation points!!!! And random CAPITALIZATIONS. !!!!

I hope I do not have nightmares of Michael Bloomberg raiding Hayek’s grave.

“Obesity is a nationwide problem, and all over the United States, public health officials are wringing their hands saying, ‘Oh, this is terrible,’ ” Mr. Bloomberg said in an interview on Wednesday in City Hall’s sprawling Governor’s Room.

“New York City is not about wringing your hands; it’s about doing something,” he said. “I think that’s what the public wants the mayor to do.”

Just read that last sentences again. Let’s analyze this from the perspective of pronouns.

The first sentence shifts any blame or credibility. He only refers to unnamed “public health officials” who are “wringing their hands.”

The second sentence does the same. He shifted the collectie to the entirety of “New York City.” All those silly public health officials outside New York are impotent. But in New York, we can do better. And what will New Yorkers do? “Something.” No specifics here. We gott do something.

In the next second, he shirks any concevable sense of responsibility–I don’t want to do this, the public wants me to do it. Or, more precisely, he *thinks* it is what the public (however define) would want the mayor (not “me”) to do. His words suggest that he is living in some detached universe. By shifting to the third person, you can tell he is not confident about this himself. He is trying to cover for the fact that he has no basis to do this. Rather, he tries to deflect everything to others–public health officials outside New York, public health official in New York, the public.

Well, at the least we can hope that the “public” will be responsible for determining whether this is something the Mayor should do. Right? No?

Mr. Bloomberg’s proposal requires the approval of the Board of Health, a step that is considered likely because the members are all appointed by him, and the board’s chairman is the city’s health commissioner, who joined the mayor in supporting the measure on Wednesday. . . .

With the new proposal, City Hall is now trying to see how much it can accomplish without requiring outside approval. Mayoral aides say they are confident that they have the legal authority to restrict soda sales, based on the city’s jurisdiction over local eating establishments, the same oversight that allows for the health department’s letter-grade cleanliness rating system for restaurants.

His allusion to, and delusion of, the public, is palpable. There is no public. It’s him, and his cronies, sitting around a table in City Hall sipping Evian and scowling at coke.

The mayor, who said he occasionally drank a diet soda “on a hot day,” contested the idea that the plan would limit consumers’ choices, saying the option to buy more soda would always be available.

“Your argument, I guess, could be that it’s a little less convenient to have to carry two 16-ounce drinks to your seat in the movie theater rather than one 32 ounce,” Mr. Bloomberg said in a sarcastic tone. “I don’t think you can make the case that we’re taking things away.”

So here Bloomberg speaks with such prevarication and equivocation I am not sure where to start. He grossly mischaracterizes and minimizes any objections to this law–who needs to carry two 16-ounce drinks in a movie theater. Forget the fact that he is limiting what and how people can imbibe. Pef. And, with sarcasm, he does not deny that “we are taking things away from people.” Nor does he think that he is “taking things away.” Rather, he does not think that you can make the case that he is taking stuff away.

Let’s deconstruct that. Making the case that the Mayor is taking stuff away is not the same thing as the Mayor taking stuff away. In fact, Bloomberg most certainly is taking stuff away. But, his argument focuses on whether they can “make the case.” And under his bizarre movie-theater hypothetical, the “case” would fail. Yet, he really doesn’t say whether the case was made. He says he doesn’t think the case was made. That is an additional layer of subjectivity.

Think about that. in the mind of Bloomberg, his opponents could not defeat a strawman argument he set up.

Does it matter what the context is when children are involved? Not really. In this article, it talks about placing restrictions on where sex offenders can live, work, and even exist.

Orange County finds itself at the enter of a new wave of laws restricting the movement of sex offenders. The county government and a dozen cities here have banned sex offenders from even setting foot in public parks, on beaches and at harbors, rendering almost half the parks in Orange County closed to them. Ten more cities are considering similar legislation.

And Orange County is far from alone. In recent years, communities around the country have gone beyond regulating where sex offenders can live and begun banning them outright from a growing list of public places.

Hamilton said “was happenin’?”
Jackson said “wat it do?”
Grant chucked up a deuce
My Benjamin said “f*ck you”

In a song, appropriately titled, Money.

Have you been following this stupid bath salt scare? I first heard of it almost two years ago. A teenager I knew told me that teens were smoking bath salts, or something. I assumed that was slang for crack or something. No, actual bath salts. Over the past few years there has been some moves to ban these salts.

Whatever.

Now I’m blaring the black swan alert. Did you see that story of the guy in Miami who was eating some other guy’s face. A cop shot him to death. Yeah, well it turns out the dude was on bath salts.

Miami police suspect that what caused a 31-year-old man to rip off his clothes and viciously gnaw on the face of another man in a daylight attack on a busy highway is a new and extremely dangerous street drug known as “bath salts.”

A Miami police officer shot Rudy Eugene Saturday after repeated pleas for him stop eating another man’s face. His demands were met with only growls. Eugene continued, and it took four bullets to kill and finally stop him as witnesses watched in horror.

According to police little remained of the victim’s face, with 75 percent of it eaten away rendering him almost unrecognizable. One source says all that remained was blood and the victim’s goatee. ABC News affiliate WPLG identified the victim as Ronald Poppo.

Police have not officially connected Eugene’s behavior to “bath salts,” but experts say he was exhibiting the classic signs of someone high on the drug.

Armando Aguilar, president of the Miami Fraternal Order of police, who has been in contact with the officer who killed Eugene, says the similarities between this and other recent cases involving “bath salts” are striking.

“The cases are similar minus a man eating another. People taking off their clothes. People suddenly have super human strength,” says Aguilar. “They become violent and they are burning up for the inside. Their organs are reaching a level that most would die. By the time police approach them they are a walking dead person.”

In the law, we would say that the absence of a man eating another man is a KEY DISTINGUISHING factor. Two crimes–one with cannibalism, one without–are not similar.

Oh I love how cops can drive up hysterics very quickly.

 

Despite such broad political support—plus that of health insurers, providers, drug companies and patient groups—the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) unfortunately has rushed in to play bureaucratic spoiler just as this new engine of innovation was leaving the station.

The FDA wants to regulate software used to support the decisions made by patients and health-care providers in the same way it regulates the software embedded in medical hardware such as X-ray machines and infusion pumps. But existing regulations don’t fit the new kinds of apps that developers are making, such as portable health records and programs that let doctors and patients keep track of data on iPads. Some 62% of physicians are now using tablets at the point of patient care.

As health-care providers computerize how they take care of us, we’re computerizing how we take care of ourselves—and how we connect back to our doctors. There are apps for managing our prescriptions, tracking blood sugar, and monitoring pacemakers or pregnancies. These tools are critical to breaking the chokehold that paperwork, waiting rooms and endless process have on medicine.

Like all apps that have revolutionized the way we interact with our physical world, mobile health apps are the creatures of an innovation juggernaut. Now this culture of innovation is threatened by government bureaucracy. . . .

Sens. Michael Bennet (D., Colo.) and Orrin Hatch (R., Utah) have introduced an amendment that puts a moratorium on the FDA’s power grab while Congress studies how to build a modern regulatory framework suited to these new software tools. There’s good reason why apps that support doctor and patient decisions might merely need to meet certain specifications (regarding ease of use, for example, or reproducibility of performance) to earn government approval, rather than undergo the time-consuming and costly premarket clearance that the FDA demands for other kinds of products.

The Bennet-Hatch amendment—which a bipartisan group of senators is trying to insert into a bill expected to pass Congress this week (the Prescription Drug User Fee Act, which helps fund the FDA’s operations)—asks for the different government agencies that already have a stake in this software technology to work together on developing proposals for regulating these new tools. Yet FDA staff is lobbying against the proposal.

The FDA’s approach to health-information technology risks snuffing out activity at a critical frontier of health care. Poor, slow regulation would encourage programmers to move on, leaving health care to roil away for yet another generation, fragmented, disconnected and choking on paperwork.

From WSJ.