Unintended Consequences

I do not really want to write about male p0rn stars, but this story from the Associated Press provides such an excellent example of the law of unintended consequences that I couldn’t pass it up.

Two adult film actors have contracted HIV, with one most likely infecting the other during unprotected sex at a film shoot in Nevada where testing was less stringent than industry standards, officials said.

One of the actors had previously tested negative for the virus that causes AIDS before a pair of film shoots, but then began showing symptoms during the second shoot and was later found to be HIV-positive, the California Department of Public Health said Monday in a statement.

“In this case, the actor and production company thought he was HIV-negative during filming,” the statement said. “Shortly after his negative test, HIV levels in his body rose rapidly to where he could infect other actors through unprotected sex.”

The infections came amid a major decline in porn filming in Los Angeles County – once the center of porn production in the country – after the 2012 passage of a law requiring porn actors to use condoms during filming. The number of porn filmmakers applying for shooting permits in the county declined from 485 in 2012 to 40 in 2013.

The Free Speech Coalition, a California-based trade group for the adult film industry, said the pair of film shoots linked to the latest infections occurred in September on a Nevada set using tests that do not detect HIV as early as tests done on sets that fully comply with industry standards.

“Not only did this leave those who participated at risk, it made it much harder to track scene partners once the possible infection was discovered,” the coalition group said in a statement.

As you might imagine, the adult film industry provides many opportunities for the transmission not just of HIV but any sexually transmitted disease among its performers. An obvious precaution, along with the regular testing mentioned, might be for the male actors to wear condoms during their performance. For some reason, the adult film makers have tended to resist this step, perhaps out of concern that it would not be appreciated by their consumers. Since the industry will not adopt the standard voluntarily,a referendum in Los Angeles County required the wearing of the protective device while shooting. Problem solved.

Not really. As the story indicates, the adult film producers did not simply change their production practices to comply with the new regulation. Since that particular industry does not rely on a fixed location or immovable machinery, they simply decided to conduct their business outside of Los Angeles County, with perhaps lower safety standards then had been the norm.

It is all too easy to try to solve problems by passing new laws. Legislators are particularly vulnerable to this temptation since passing laws is what they do for a living. The problem is that passing a law or regulation does not magically solve the problem. Sometimes it may make the problem worse. I have written before how legislation can be ineffective or worse, even if well intentioned, if it is passed without a careful consideration of the conceivable consequences. Unfortunately, since legislators are usually judged by how many pleasant sounding laws they support and rarely by the actual consequences of these laws, we will likely see many more examples of unintended consequences.

Related articles

• 2 Male Porn Actors Test Positive For HIV After Filming In Nevada (losangeles.cbslocal.com)

Advertisement

Redrawn Map

I have been having fun with the e-mails that I have been receiving from the Democrats for quite a long time now, but fairness demands that I also have some fun with the e-mails that conservative groups send me, at least when they descend into silliness or apocalyptic paranoia. Such is the case with this one I got from Townhall.com.

Dear Reader,

The America you know and love could look completely different in a matter of weeks.

Under a plan circulating the D.C. corridor right now, up to 16 states are at risk to be terminated due to epic fiscal mismanagement.

These states would simply be wiped from existence and merged into their neighbors.

We’ve even seen the redrawn map of the U.S. and it’s nothing less than terrifying.

California may be forced to become a part of Mexico without any state strong enough to absorb it!

Last week Treasury Secretary Jack Lew even took the time to urge congressional leaders to take action before events unfold that could lead to this national tragedy.

But it may already be too late.

To see the redrawn map of the U.S. and learn if your state is targeted for potential termination, it’s essential that you watch this short video we’ve produced.

It could be the slight head start that saves your entire future.

View it here, for free, right now.

This is an advertisement for Wall Street Daily, some sort of financial newsletter that seems to cater to survivalists and doomsday preppers. The link leads to a video of a fake news report of the federal government defaulting on its debts. I didn’t have the patience to watch it all the way through so I haven’t seen the redrawn map. I think Indiana would be relatively safe since our fiscal situation is strong thanks to former governor Mitch Daniels. I hope they don’t add Kentucky or Illinois to our state. I don’t want them. I also have no objections at all to giving California back to Mexico. The nuts and the crazies have long since taken control of that state and run it into the ground. Let the Mexicans straighten them out.

 

Selling Out to Big Oil

Drill, baby, drill (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I sometimes wonder just who the target audience is for the Democratic fund raising e-mails I receive.

This is just downright insulting:

After President Obama’s call to protect our environment with real solutions, Republicans just voted to allow incredibly dangerous drilling off beaches up and down both coasts.

It’s no surprise that this vote came after the Big Oil billionaire Koch brothers gave Tea Party Republicans record amounts of cash.

David — If you want to show Boehner, Cantor, and the Republicans that we’re tired of them selling out our environment for Big Oil cash, now’s the time. Our campaign to kick the Tea Party out of Congress is up against our biggest deadline of the year in 48 hours.

It’s unbelievable that more than three years after the BP spill, Republicans in Congress have yet to enact a single legislative reform to improve the safety of offshore drilling. And now, Republicans want to allow even more unsafe drilling rigs to pop up off of beaches in California and across the East Coast.

The only way we’ll get real action to protect our environment and combat climate change is if we kick out these anti-science Republicans and replace them with a Democratic House majority. Right now, we’re looking at a $450,000 hole in our budget. We could really use your help before Sunday’s fundraising deadline.

My guess would be people who don’t have to worry about high gas prices.

 

Related articles

• House moves to expand offshore drilling (fuelfix.com)
• House Republicans’ Response To Obama’s Climate Plan: Drill, Baby, Drill (thinkprogress.org.feedsportal.com)

They’re Back!

The Occupiers are planning on coming back this spring after spending the winter in a hole, or under a rock, or something. I read this article in Bloomberg via Drudge.

Occupy Wall Street demonstrators, whose anti-greed message spread worldwide during an eight-week encampment in Lower Manhattan last year, plan marches across the globe tomorrow calling attention to what they say are abuses of power and wealth.

Organizers say they hope the coordinated events will mark a spring resurgence of the movement after a quiet winter. Calls for a general strike with no work, no school, no banking and no shopping have sprung up on websites in Toronto, Barcelona, London, Kuala Lumpur and Sydney, among hundreds of cities in North America, Europe and Asia.

In New York, Occupy Wall Street will join scores of labor organizations observing May 1, traditionally recognized as International Workers’ Day. They plan marches from Union Square to Lower Manhattan and a “pop-up occupation” of Bryant Park on Sixth Avenue, across the street from Bank of America’s Corp.’s 55-story tower.

“We call upon people to refrain from shopping, walk out of class, take the day off of work and other creative forms of resistance disrupting the status quo,” organizers said in an April 26 e-mail.

Occupy groups across the U.S. have protested economic disparity, decrying high foreclosure and unemployment rates that hurt average Americans while bankers and financial executives received bonuses and taxpayer-funded bailouts. In the past six months, similar groups, using social media and other tools, have sprung up in Europe, Asia and Latin America

I really love that “anti-greed” description of their message. I might have described their message as anti property-rights (for other people), anti-intelligence or anti-sanitation. I am sure they will win a lot of support from New Yorkers and others after a whole day spent disrupting traffic and harassing people.

Meanwhile, Zombie reported on the efforts of some misguided fools to occupy a farm.

Are you ready for the most ridiculous and pointless Occupation ever?

Last week, on Earth Day, the Occupy movement illegally took over an entire farm and transformed it into…a farm!

So proud are they of this revolutionary act that they showed off the farm to the media yesterday, so naturally I had to check it out.

There are a lot more pictures. The farm is question is a research farm in which agricultural scientists study ways to increase crop yields while reducing the impact on the environment. By “occupying” this farm, these people may ruin years of research.

The problem that these people are going to run into is that farming is not a lot of fun and games. You have to be willing to work long and hard day after day. If these people were interested in actually working and not just playing at being revolutionaries, they would actually have jobs and be productive members of our society. As it is, I think it would be an interesting experiment to lock them into that farm and make them live off whatever crops they manage to grow.

Related articles

• Occupy Wall Street, Take Two (thedailybeast.com)
• Mayor warns Occupy May Day could turn violent (wnd.com)

Taxing Internet Sales

From the Orange County Register. California Governor Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown just signed a law taxing Internet sales. The  state Board of Equalization (whatever that is) estimates that this measure will raise some $200 million. The California Retailer’s Association is pleased.

California Retailers Association stated:  “We thank Governor Jerry Brown and the leaders in the California State Legislature who have demonstrated their leadership and commitment to California businesses by passing and signing e-fairness into law. Small and large businesses across the state have been held at a major disadvantage by the current law that out-of-state online companies like Amazon.com and Overstock.com have exploited for years. This has cost us jobs and revenues.”

So, how is it working out? Well, it would seem that Amazon.com has decided to end its affiliate advertising program with over 25,000 California websites. In their e-mail, Amazon.com explained why this was necessary.

(The bill) specifically imposes the collection of taxes from consumers on sales by online retailers – including but not limited to those referred by California-based marketing affiliates like you – even if those retailers have no physical presence in the state.

We oppose this bill because it is unconstitutional and counterproductive. It is supported by big-box retailers, most of which are based outside California, that seek to harm the affiliate advertising programs of their competitors. Similar legislation in other states has led to job and income losses, and little, if any, new tax revenue. We deeply regret that we must take this action.

Oh, well. It would seem that the state of California will not be seeing $200 million in revenue coming in. I wish that politicians would get it into their heads that people will try to avoid taxation.

The Lash

Here is an interesting idea in the Washington Post. Peter Moskos thinks that we should consider corporal punishment as an alternative to incarceration.

America has a prison problem. Never in the history of the world has a country locked up so many of its people. We have more prisons than China, and it has a billion more people than we do. Forty years ago America had 338,000 people behind bars. Today 2.3 million are incarcerated. We have more prisoners than soldiers. Something has gone terribly wrong.

The problem — mostly due to longer and mandatory sentences combined with an idiotic war on drugs — is so abysmal that the Supreme Court recently ordered 33,000 prisoners in California to be housed elsewhere or released. If California could simply return to its 1970 level of incarceration, the savings from its $9 billion prison budget would cut the state’s budget deficit in half. But doing so would require the release of 125,000 inmates, and not even the most progressive reformer has a plan to reduce the prison population by 85 percent.

Flogging seems barbaric to us but actually conditions in most prisons are far worse. if I had to choose between getting five or ten lashes or spending five years in prison getting beaten up and raped, it would be an easy choice for me.

Moskos seems to think that the root of the problem is the idea that prisons would rehabilitate the criminals housed in them. That has obviously not worked so well and instead they have become huge warehouses, which actually contribute to crime.

The idea was that penitentiaries would heal the criminally ill just as hospitals cured the physically sick. It didn’t work. Yet despite — or perhaps because of — the failures of the first prisons, states authorized more and larger prisons. With flogging banned and crime not cured, there was simply no alternative. We tried rehabilitation and ended up with supermax. We tried to be humane and ended up with more prisoners than Stalin had at the height of the Soviet Gulag. Somewhere in the process, we lost the concept of justice and punishment in a free society.

Today, the prison-industrial complex has become little more than a massive government-run make-work program that profits from human bondage. To oversimplify — just a bit — we pay poor, unemployed rural whites to guard poor, unemployed urban blacks.

Of course some people are simply too dangerous to release — pedophiles, terrorists and the truly psychopathic, for instance. But they’re relatively few in number. And we keep these people behind bars because we’re afraid of them.

As to the other 2 million common criminals, the 2 million more than we had in 1970, we can’t and won’t keep them locked up forever. Ninety-five percent of prisoners are eventually released. The question is not if but when and how.

Incarceration not only fails to deter crime but in many ways can increase it. For crime driven by economic demand, such as drug dealing, arresting one seller creates a job opening for others, who might fight over the vacant position.

Incarceration destroys families and jobs, exactly what people need to have in order to stay away from crime. Incarcerated criminals are more likely to reoffend than similar people given alternative sentences. To break the cycle of crime, people need help. And they would need less help if they were never incarcerated in the first place.

He forgets to mention that prisons can become schools of crime in which criminals are able to learn new techniques from each other.

Is Peter Moskos right? Should we reintroduce flogging? I don’t really know. I don’t think the lash will deter many potential criminals though. I could be wrong, but I get the impression that the reason many criminals are criminals is that they exhibit poor impulse control and do not think through the consequences of their actions.

Indiana # 3 Yea!

Indiana is the third freest state in the union according to this report from the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. They rank the states in order and Indiana is number three, right behind New Hampshire and South Dakota. California, New Jersey and New York rank forty-eighth, forty-ninth, and fiftieth, which isn’t much of a surprise. Our neighbors Illinois and Ohio rank forty-one and forty-two, while Kentucky is thirty-two.

I’m not sure precisely what criteria they use. They have a report in pdf form to download and I think I will read it. It’s interesting to see how the fifty states rank relative to each other, but I think it might have been more useful if they had some sort of measure, maybe like Freedom House gives each nation a score from 1-7 on political rights and civil liberties

Teachers’ Protest in San Francisco

If you are still sending your kids to “learn” in the public school system, then these pictures by Zombie at Pajamas Media will make you want to pull them right out. That is, unless you want them to be indoctrinated as Socialists. It is more than a little disgraceful to have these teachers drag their students out of class to use them as political props, not to mention demanding more money when the state of California is broke.

This sort of thing is part of the reason we homeschool.