The 9/11 Commission has come forth with some answers to what I've always considered one of the most important questions re: 9/11: what the hell happened to our vaunted, very expensive air defense?

The answer, as detailed in this thorough account (as printed in the L.A. Times, reg. req.) of reactions to each of the four hijacked flights, is apparently: air traffic control and the Federal Aviation Administration weren't very scupulous about informing the military that anything was going wrong.

A not-that-anyone's-really-noticing brewing scandal (though I doubt the teakettle will ever make much public noise) regarding feeding experimental AIDS drugs to kids in foster care. An excerpt from an article in the May issue A & U magazine, a magazine devoted to the AIDS community:

Incarnation Children’s Center (ICC) is a Catholic-owned group home near Harlem—the city’s only group home exclusively for HIV-positive foster children. Opened in 1989, ICC once enjoyed warm fuzzy media coverage and visits from Princess Diana. Now it’s hit with allegations that, between 1995 and 2002, more than 100 ICC children were illegally used and abused in AIDS research. Black and Latino babies and children from poor families were used as test subjects in Phase I and II clinical trials funded by the NIH and administered by Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center doctors.

It’s nothing new for children to participate in AIDS trials, with parental consent. But Incarnation is a foster home—the kids are all wards. Evidently many were seized from their HIV-positive mothers by the city’s Administration for Children’s Services. The ACS then “volunteered” at least 100 children for these trials of vaccines and drugs, including AZT, protease inhibitors, and combinations supplied by GlaxoSmith-Kline, Pfizer, Biocine, Roche, Genentech, and other firms. Some children were shuffled to ICC from area hospitals that were also participating in trials.

In January 2004, the first allegations came from freelance reporter Liam Scheff.... He interviewed ICC’s medical director, a former ICC pediatric nurse, and several worried parents whose children were at the home. Scheff wrote: “When the children refuse the drugs, they’re force-fed. If the kids continue to refuse, they’re given a surgery to implant a plastic tube through their abdomen into their stomach. The drugs are then injected directly into their stomachs—no refusing.” Scheff alleged that several children had died as a result of treatment side effects.

There are other “real questions.” Phase I and II trials involve the highest risk, because they do the first explorations of safety, toxicity, dose tolerance. In 1989 the FDA approved the highly toxic AZT for children under thirteen on a “compassionate use” basis, though clinical trials were still in progress. Yet just a few years later, it was mandatory for HIV-positive mothers to allow their children to be treated, or face loss of custody, even criminal charges. How was this policy shift justified, when Phase I and II drug trials were still ongoing? Even today, government officials admit at www.clinicaltrials.gov that they still don’t know the long-term effects of HIV drug treatments on infants and growing children. Why have major media parroted the government reassurances instead of asking real questions about children’s treatment safety?

The article by Scheff mentioned above can be found here (it's filled with some truly gruesome details); an alarmed response to all this from the Alliance for Human Research Protection ("a national network of lay people and professionals dedicated to advancing responsible and ethical medical research practices") is here. An excerpt from that:

The AHRP believes that the guidelines of both the State Department of Health and the New York City Agency for Children's Services--"Enrollment Procedures for ACS-Approved Clinical Trials" - violate federal regulations that restrict the use of children who are wards of the state as experimental subjects. We further believe that the concerted effort by New York State/City agencies to use foster care children in Phase I and Phase II safety trials violates federal regulations for the protection of human subjects (45 CFR 46). Research involving human subjects "must comply with all sections" of these federal regulations. States may issue regulations "which provide additional protections for human subjects," but may not decrease the protections specified in federal guidelines. See: 45 CFR 46.101(6)(e)(f)

Specifically, the Code of Federal Regulations (45 CFR 46.409 and 21 CFR 50.56) prohibits the use of children who are wards of the state from being subjected to experiments involving greater than minimal risk.

That release also contains a list of ongoing Phase I trials involving experimental AIDS drugs in children. I wrote a feature for Reason about state efforts to pre-empt parent's and children's rights when it comes to state decisions about what sort of medical care is "necessary" back in our February 2001 issue.

The Economist suggests that if Bush is eager to wrap himeself in the (thus far ill-fitting) mantle of Reagan, he might want to break the glass case around his veto pen and block the bloated corporate tax bill just passed by both house and senate. The hefty tax cuts included may sound nice, but it shouldn't take over 900 pages, the size of the Senate version of the bill, to cut tax rates: The bill is packed with market-distorting provisions designed to assist specific industries and firms, "offsetting" tax increases elsewhere, and multi-billion dollar bailout for tobacco growers.

Declan McCullagh reports on a draconian sounding bill that could effectively ban p2p file sharing networks and gut the Betamax decision, which protected the makers of products which could be used to infringe copyrights, provided there were other, non-infringing uses.

From the Christian Science Monitor, a roundup of the week's intelligence news, including the Pentagon's seeking the ability to circumvent existing Privacy Act requirements that they identify themselves when seeking intelligence on U.S. citizens in the U.S. A couple of excerpts:

Currently all military intelligence organizations must comply with the Privacy Act. The act is a Watergate-era law that requires that any government official who is seeking information from a resident of the US disclose who they are and why they are seeking the information. But Newsweek reports that last month the Senate Intelligence Committee, in closed session, added the provision that would exempt the Pentagon from this restriction. The bill is S.2386, in specific Sec.502 - Defense intelligence exemption from certain Privacy Act requirements.
......
A report by the Senate Intelligence Committee says the provision would allow military intel agents to "approach potential sources and collect personal information from them" without disclosing they work for the government. The justification: "Current counterterrorism operations," the report explains, which require "greater latitude ... both overseas and within the United States." ... Pentagon lawyers insist agents will still be legally barred from domestic "law enforcement." But watchdog groups see a potentially alarming "mission creep." "This... is giving them the authority to spy on Americans," said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, a group frequently critical of the war on terror. "And it's all been done with no public discussion, in the dark of night."

The article also goes on to discuss controversy over what some see as an attempt to make military intelligence trump civilian intelligence, through the office of the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, currently held by Stephen Cambone. The article quotes former congressman and current civil liberties watchdog Bob Barr on this:

If in fact [Rumsfeld]and his military intelligence team, headed by [Cambone], are able to take advantage of the leadership uncertainty at the CIA, and if Mr. Bush allows this to happen or encourages it by naming a military person to replace Mr. Tenet, then the goal of a truly independent foreign intelligence apparatus to serve the president objectively – a goal the Defense Department has resisted for 55 years – will be unceremoniously laid to rest. The mistakes of the past will be, sadly, then repeated.

Trouble for prescription drug buyers in Mexico:

A crackdown on Americans buying certain prescription drugs has resulted in the arrest of 12 Arizonans since May. Those arrested include a Phoenix man who said he came here to buy Valium for his wife after their health insurance stopped covering it. He's in prison awaiting trial in August.

(via freemarket.net)

We also need public busing and public cafeterias. God forbid someone makes a profit from feeding schoolchildren!

From busing children to school to making their lunchtime meals, private companies are increasingly performing work traditionally done by school district employees, a National Education Association official said in Cheyenne on Wednesday.

If not reversed, that trend has the potential to seriously damage the country's public education system, said NEA Secretary-Treasurer Lily Eskelsen.

...

She said there are political leaders in this country who seem to despise anything with the word "public" in its title while deeming anything "private" to be good and efficient.

Apparently, there are also political leaders in this country who seem to despise anything private and efficient while deeming anything public to be good.

UPDATE: Oops! As the comment from Evan points out, I forgot to include the link. Here it is.

Does Jacob Sullum have Chairman Hu to thank for his successful adoption? The paradoxes of the one-child dictatorship.

The Los Angeles Times today has the sad story (reg. req., alas) But here's the gist:

Federal authorities arrested an architect of one of Southern California's most ambitious clean air programs Wednesday, culminating an investigation into claims that she defrauded companies of tens of millions of dollars.
......
A decade ago, [Anne] Sholtz helped the South Coast Air Quality Management District design a controversial pollution program called the Regional Clean Air Incentives Market, or RECLAIM. It allows more than 300 companies, including some of the region's largest businesses, to trade "pollution credits" among one another, while capping the overall amount of unhealthful exhaust they are allowed to emit from their factories and power plants.

The year the program was launched, 1993, Sholtz started a Pasadena-based auction house where companies could buy and sell the pollution credits. Federal prosecutors now allege that she made fraudulent trades and other illegal transactions while acting as a broker in the system she helped establish. According to investigators, the bogus transactions proved costly to dozens of large oil and power companies, including Sempra Energy and Reliant Energy.

$13 million passed through her personal bank account in 2002, which is apparently suspicious, I guess. The parent company of her emissions trading exchange filed for bankruptcy in 2002, and aggrieved companies who did emissions-trading business with Sholtz have filed many multi-million dollar claims against that company. Among the schemes she is alleged to have indulged in are selling the same pollution credits to different companies.

I wrote about the early stages, theories, and realities of emissions-trading programs (including RECLAIM) intended to help manage pollution in Reason way back in 1996.

Along the same lines as Tim's post below, the government of North Korea is encouraging their hapless citizens to eat pine needles.

Pyongyang, June 15 (KCNA) -- Pine needle has been used as material of health foodstuffs from ancient times in Korea. According to "Hyangyakjipsongbang" (a medical encyclopedia) published in the 15th century in Korea, pine needle prevents aging, invigorates spirits and turns grey hair to black.

The Korean people have used pine needles in steaming rice-cake and curing various diseases.

Interfax says China's government is cracking down on condiment makers after exposing soy sauce producers, on state-run television, using human hair in their product:

China Central Television (CCTV), the state television station, first raised public worries over the quality of domestic soy sauce by uncovering a substandard workshop in central China's Hubei Province, where piles of waste human hair were found. The hairs were treated in special containers to distill amino acid, the most common substance contained in soybean sauce...

By producing soy sauce from such raw materials, the producers were said able to cut costs by half. Workers employed at the plants, however, never bought soy sauce marked as "blended" on the packaging, because that usually meant that human hair was the basic material in the sauce.

Soy sauce made from human hair is not the first low-quality food product exposed by state television, which launched a program called "Weekly Quality Report" around half a year ago. The program, which conducts investigations into the low quality of some of China's most common food products, has frequently ruined the public appetite.

"The government has now ordered an immediate inspection of all domestic food seasoning plants before the end of January," says Interfax.

Related story from the Hong Kong Standard.

Encouraged at China's new openness to public concerns? Appalled at the state's scapegoating of entrepreuners? We report, you deride.

Julian Sanchez considers why both racist, fanatical, extremist right-wing warmongers and America-hating, socialist, treasonous, homo-loving left-wing freaks like to caricature each other.

Matt Welch on journalists who have better things to do than defend free expression.

Radley Balko has a nominee for the "most asinine neoprotectionist law on the books" award.

Interesting piece from the BBC about modern codebreaking in an era of essentially unbreakable codes, hooked to the Chalabi scandal regarding U.S. breaking of Iranian codes. Some excerpts:

Simon Singh, author of "The Code Book", a history of codes, said: "Modern codes are effectively unbreakable, very cheap and widely available. I could send an email today and all the world's secret services using all the computers in the world would not be able to break it. The code maker definitely has a huge advantage over the codebreaker."
.......
Ross Anderson of the Computer Laboratory at Cambridge University [says]: "As the former chief scientist of the NSA once remarked at one of our security workshops, almost all breaks of cipher systems are due to implementation errors, operational failures, burglary, blackmail and bribery. As for cryptanalysis, it happens, but very much less often than most people think."
......
The three "Bs" - burglary, blackmail and bribery - might have to be employed if there is no other way of getting at the key. We are back to the world of spies.
.....
Simon Singh says that sometimes there is a backdoor way in through deliberately corrupted software: "There is always the chance of human error. Encryption requires a key, and if I get hold of your key then I can read your messages. Or if I plant some software in I get to see the message before you encrypt it." Whether something similar happened in this case involving Iran is simply not known.

Lots of neat details on the distinctions between private-private and public-private keys, the difficulty of factoring the product of multiplied prime numbers, and other such codemaking fun, and worth reading in full if the topic interests you at all.

Proponents of fair use have found 20 congresspersons willing to sponsor a bill to repeal the DMCA and make CD and DVD copying for noncommercial purposes possible again.

"Congress crafted fair use to be case-by-case," said Fred Von Lohmann, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has sent Congress about 30,000 letters and faxes from Americans supporting HR107. "The problem with the DMCA is that those debates are never going to happen."

Von Lohmann said the DMCA treats all unauthorized copying as a crime, rather than letting courts decide what constitutes fair use -- in a nutshell, a legal concept that allows people to copy other people's creative works if they intend to use it for noncommercial purposes, like teaching, criticism or journalism. Congress tried to codify these concepts with the 1976 Copyright Act.

"The DMCA has supplanted the balance of the Copyright Act over the last century," Von Lohmann said.

The bill isn't expected to pass this year, but at least there's some momentum out there.

On spending, there's no comparison, says American Enterprise Institute's Veronique de Rugy:

President Bush, like Reagan, has implemented large across-the-board tax cuts and has boosted defense spending. The analogy is tempting but incorrect. President Reagan's legacy includes his courageous and largely unappreciated willingness to fight for reductions in domestic spending. By contrast, President Bush has engaged in large, nondefense domestic spending. Ronald Reagan sought--and won--more spending cuts than any other modern president. He is the only president in the last forty years to cut inflation-adjusted nondefense outlays, which fell by 9.7 percent during his first term. George W. Bush, in contrast, increased real nondefense spending by at least 25.3 percent during his first term.

Whole thing here.

[Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan]

27 votes against Bush:

The Bush administration does not understand the world and remains unable to handle "in either style or substance" the responsibilities of global leadership, a group of 27 retired diplomats and military commanders charged yesterday...

Among the retired officials signing the statement were Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Ronald Reagan and U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James's under President Bill Clinton, and Marine Gen. Joseph P. Hoar, named by President George H.W. Bush to lead U.S. forces in the Middle East.

Update: Listing of signatories here.

Reason comes in at #13 on the Chicago Tribune's second annual list of the 50 Best Magazines.

13. Reason. In an era of smash-mouth, left vs. right political discourse, the libertarian Reason is a fresh and nuanced antidote, with a frequent a-plague-on-both-their-houses approach. And it kicked butt with a head-turning cover story, meant to underscore the power of database marketing, in which the cover was personalized for each of the 40,000 subscribers with an aerial photograph of the mailing address.

(We moved up from #21 last year.)

Thank you to all our readers. And if you don't already get the print edition, why not subscribe today? Or give a gift subscription.

"Movies are America's most populist art form, and the battle over widescreen pitted film geeks against the masses," writes Bryan Curtis in a Slate article about the triumph of the widescreen DVD format. "How did the geeks win—how did widescreen become the dominant way to watch a movie at home?"

It's true: Widescreen, letterboxed DVDs now routinely outsell "fullscreen" pan-and-scan. Even Blockbuster, once the nation's champion of fullscreen dumbdownification, has relented, and now favors widescreen. Curtis' explanation:

One reason, perhaps, is that big-screen TVs have eliminated the aesthetic problem with widescreen viewing. Televisions have plunged in price in recent years, allowing buyers to take home larger and larger sets. Since the major complaint about widescreen DVDs is the smaller picture, super-sized TVs point the way toward nirvana: On a 55-incher, widescreen's black bars are a minor irritation. Plus, there's the emerging line of widescreen TVs, which for most widescreen DVDs will eliminate the black bars altogether.

There's a bigger factor behind widescreen's triumph: what you might call the continuing education of the filmgoer. If casual movie fans prefer pan-and-scan and film buffs prefer widescreen, then one way to tip the balance is to turn the casual fans into buffs. The DVD format seems to have had precisely that effect. When you sift through Amazon.com's sales data, it's no surprise to find that for so-called "geek" movies—say, The Lord of the Rings—the widescreen disc outsells the pan-and-scan. But what is surprising is that when you call up films that aren't the province of geeks—say, Miracle—the widescreen version still comes out on top. Why? Well, the extras offered on DVDs give customers access to intellectual resources they never would have dreamed of with VHS. If this has not produced more discerning cinéastes—Scary Movie 3 outsells The 400 Blows, and it always will—then perhaps it has at least produced more discerning customers.

Of course, if you want to be a real cinéaste, you can always claim that widescreen itself is an excrescence, that movies never should have abandoned the "golden ratio" of 1.33 to 1. Fritz Lang, one of the few dissenters when Fox introduced CinemaScope (2.35 to 1) in 1953, claimed the format was only suitable for funerals and snakes. While you might not get much mileage out of that argument, I think there's a good case to be made that the modern "normal" ratio of 1.85 (which replaced 1.33) is inferior to the old format, since it's produced by merely masking the top and bottom of the movie screen.

Though I was an early convert to widescreen snobbery, I think there's always been a paradox in that position. Fox introduced CinemaScope specifically to compete with television, by producing a picture the small screen couldn't reproduce. I always thought the TV guys' "tough titty" response to this controversy was understandable: If you want to outdo TV, you have to suck it up in the home entertainment market. In any event, the forward march of technology has once again obviated a bitter controversy. And the once-celebrated "Letterboxing Is Censorship" guy can ride off into the inexpertly cropped sunset.

The catch-all page of Reason's war coverage (ahem, Reason's award-winning war coverage), is back up to date. Without addressing whether the war in Iraq is part of the war on terror and other hopeless rhetorical stalemates, this page contains just about everything we've done with a vaguely war or foreign policy or Near East theme since 9/11/01.

We also have a grab-bag features page of stuff that doesn't regularly get archived anywhere else. Since this page exists mainly as a place to store thematically unrelated one-offs, it's fairly schizophrenic , featuring everything from Elizabeth Koch's Martha Stewart coverage to Brian Doherty's Cerebus retrospective to Michael Young's Edward Said obit to my own shortlist of Democratic Homeland Security czars. Though I can't figure out where this page belongs on the site, feel free to see if any of our old chestnuts really rock your world.

Missed the new Fall catalog from America's most unpredictable publisher? Too bad, because McFarland, a North Carolina house that aims its list at libraries, consistently turns out page after page of bizarre surprises.

The new list includes The Doctor Who Error Finder, which offers 4000 "transmitted bloopers"; Hick Flicks: The Rise and Fall of Redneck Cinema, which is a "comprehensive study of the hixploitation genre"; The Fountainheads: Wright, Rand, the FBI and Hollywood, which addresses, among other things, "the effect FBI harassment had on the movie." There's also a study of Forbidden Animation, of The Gay Detective Novel, of The Vampire as Numinous Experience, of Booze and the Private Eye, and plenty more.

My favorite entry is an 848-page work called Show Me the Money! The Standard Catalog of Motion Picture, Television, State and Advertising Prop Money. That's right: prop money.

Those of us who went to elite four-year colleges and universities are prone to forget that most people don't. In the Washington Post today, a community college professor writes about the differences between the experience her community college students are having on the one hand, and the experience her daughter had at an elite college on the other.

You go to community college because you are an ambitious kid whose parents don't have professional jobs. Because you are a girl in a family whose culture for thousands of years has valued education only for boys. Because you come from a family that never really thought about college for anyone, never saved for it or steered you toward it. You go to community college because you had a significant trauma during your adolescence: Perhaps you had an alcoholic parent, lost a sibling, lived in a household of chronic anger, suffered from depression or anorexia, did too many drugs. So you failed some of your high school courses, and the "good" colleges won't take you. You go to community college because you were born in another country and came to America too late to pick up English very easily. Because you landed a good job or gave birth to a beautiful baby right out of high school, and didn't look back for 10 or 15 years, when, suddenly, you thought about college. You go to community college because you have a learning disability, undiagnosed or untreated, that pushed you to the sidelines in school. Because you started at a four-year school and discovered that you weren't ready to leave home. And you go to community college because you believe that America is a society where intelligence is rewarded, and since you're such a fine, intelligent person, it's unnecessary for you to actually do any homework in high school, and suddenly you have a C average and your SATs are pretty good but, frankly, so are a lot of other people's, and the best offer you got from four-year colleges was their wait list.

Very interesting, and worth reading the whole thing.

Bad news from the rock n' roll front: The Ramones' legendarily cranky-conservative guitarist Johnny is in an L.A. hospital, "fighting a losing battle with cancer," reports CNN.

Everything I, and then Nick Gillespie and I, had to say in relation to singer Joey Ramone's legacy when he died back in 2001 bears repeating about his guitarist partner (and often sparring partner) Johnny. And it bears mentioning again and again that this guy is truly one of the greatest rock n' roll guitarists ever, brutally simple, contagiously fun, an innovator and a stylist without peer and an inspiration to almost all who ever heard him. Hoping hard that this isn't goodbye, and may his wall of perfect buzzsaw grind ring out forever.

The New York Times reports that many are predicting challenges to a National Rifle Association radio news and commentary program, which some see as an attempt to "circumvent" McCain-Feingold. But of course, as Eugene Volokh notes, there's no principled way to distinguish—and arguably no real difference—between protected advocacy journalism and editorializing and restricted electioneering. It seems unlikely the courts would allow the squelching of this speech—though one wonders why it wasn't obvious to them what a problem this would be when they upheld the original restrictions. If they did, of course, what was left of the First Amendment "loophole" would still exist, and the effect would likely be to corrupt less partisan journalism by pushing that money into attempts to capture "real" (which is to say, incumbent) media outlets.