Champion of Truth
“Legalization linked to fewer suicides, traffic fatalities, and opioid deaths. A new paper on the public health effects of legalizing marijuana finds “little credible evidence to suggest that [medical marijuana] legalization promotes marijuana use among teenagers” and “convincing evidence that young adults consume less alcohol when medical marijuana is legalized.””
“Overall, liberalizing prostitution laws was linked to a significant decrease in rape rates, while prohibition was linked to a significant increase—but the magnitude of these two shifts was far from equal. Rather, “the magnitude of prohibiting commercial sex is about four times as large as that of liberalizing it,” write Gao and Petrova.
The average rape rate in the sample countries was nine rapes per 100,000 people. Countries that liberalized prostitution laws saw a decrease of approximately three rapes per 100,000 people, relative to countries that did not change their prostitution laws. Meanwhile, countries that banned or further criminalized prostitution saw an increase of around 11 rapes per 100,000 people, relative to the control countries.”
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“Gao and Petrova do offer the caveat that “changes in prostitution laws might not be random. It is possible that a country changes the laws as part of a general program to improve women’s social status and is thus instituting other policies that may affect rape rates,” and although they attempted to control for this in various ways, these techniques “may not fully address the possible nonrandomness of prostitution laws.””
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“their findings are in line with a spate of previous research linking liberalized sex work laws to decreases in sexual violence. For instance, a 2018 study showed that rapes in Rhode Island decreased when the state temporarily decriminalized indoor prostitution. A 2017 study found fewer sexual assaults after legal street prostitution zones were opened in 25 Dutch cities. Another 2017 study linked the launch of Craigslist “erotic services” ads in various U.S. cities to decreases in female homicide rates.”
“Nearly a year after Biden’s announcement, the Department of Homeland Security says that over 271,000 Ukrainian refugees have been admitted to the United States. More than 117,000 came through the “Uniting for Ukraine” program, a private refugee sponsorship scheme through which Americans can volunteer to financially support Ukrainians. Another 150,000 came to the U.S. through pathways like the traditional refugee resettlement program or by crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.
Bringing in 271,000 refugees, while a modest accomplishment compared to what countries such as Poland, Germany, and Canada have done, is a huge deal in the context of American immigration politics—especially with as little controversy as it provoked. It speaks volumes about America’s ability to absorb large numbers of people without changing something fundamental about its culture, which immigration restrictionists often doubt. Judging by the scores of Americans who stepped up to welcome Ukrainians, American culture is equipped to absorb.”
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“assimilation potential is a slippery concept. Take language skills: According to EF Education First’s English Proficiency Index, Ukrainians fall into the same proficiency band as Cubans, Hondurans, Salvadorans, and Guatemalans. This is roughly true of their economic circumstances as well. Ukraine’s per-capita gross domestic product was $4,835 as of 2021, per the World Bank—roughly $200 lower than Guatemala and $300 higher than El Salvador.
Given those factors, Ukrainian refugees may not be as different from other migrant groups as might appear. What has been unique is the way Uniting for Ukraine has been successful in capitalizing on and building public buy-in. It offered migrants an organized, predictable, low-drama pathway, and it allowed Americans to contribute to relief efforts directly by sponsoring migrants. Ukrainians leaned into the legal immigration option, and American sponsors gladly helped them do so—both in large numbers. Contrast that with the traditional government refugee resettlement process, which resettled just 12 Ukrainian refugees in the first month following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.”
“A new report from the American Bar Association (ABA) presents more evidence that the ubiquitous use of plea bargains distorts the justice system and puts defendants at a disadvantage. Roughly 98.3 percent of federal criminal convictions result from guilty pleas, as do roughly 95 percent of state convictions. “Some jurisdictions have not had a criminal trial in many years,” the report notes. Nor is a guilty plea an absolute assurance of guilt: 18 percent percent of documented exonerations had previously pleaded guilty, as did nearly 11 percent of defendants exonerated by DNA evidence since 1989.”
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“The “trial penalty” defendants incur when they refuse to plead guilty is reflected in the sentencing data reported by the ABA. In federal felony cases, average sentences handed down at trial are seven years longer than convictions resulting from a plea bargain. “Although a modest reduction in sentence is justified in some cases resolved through guilty pleas because a defendant accepts responsibility, sentences should not be punitively inflated simply because a defendant exercised a fundamental right,” the report argues.
Plea bargaining in many cases allows prosecutors to circumvent the defendant’s right to an attorney—particularly in misdemeanor cases and in rural areas. And even with counsel, a hastily accepted plea deal forecloses the opportunity to expose potential governmental abuse. “Challenges to police misconduct are typically resolved through pretrial litigation, but the death of the trial has also increasingly meant the death of pretrial litigation, including those hearings that would bring to light police misconduct,” the report states. “Trial and pretrial litigation are essential for holding police and other state actors accountable, and plea bargaining has eroded these systems of accountability.” Moreover, many “defendants are often denied discovery, including exculpatory evidence, before they make the decision to plead guilty.””
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“Plea bargains have a single great advantage: They increase the efficiency of the justice system. “Efficiency has a role to play in criminal law policymaking, but it should not be the primary goal of that policy,” the report counters. “Rather, the goal should be a criminal justice system where defendants are guaranteed due process, victims receive justice, and the rule of law can flourish.””
https://www.yahoo.com/news/young-gamers-shook-intelligence-world-120948421.html
“A complex set of formulas caps immigration from China at about 150,000 people per year. For a country with 1.4 billion people, that’s not even a drop in the bucket. Radically increasing or eliminating this limit would do much more to halt China’s rise as a global power than harming American users by banning TikTok. Many young Chinese would jump at the chance to move to the U.S.
Why would so many Chinese be eager to leave their homes to move thousands of miles away? For starters, the United States is much, much richer. Despite decades of unprecedented economic growth, China’s gross domestic product (GDP) per capita is still 80 percent lower than America’s. For all its development and flashy infrastructure projects, China is barely a middle-income country. As of 2022, more than half of the country lives on less than $10 per day, compared to only 3 percent of Americans and about 2 percent of Europeans.
Further, China has a repressive, authoritarian government. Despite China’s harsh penalties for dissent, many of its citizens have taken to the streets in recent months to speak out against state oppression. This suggests that many Chinese, especially young and educated ones, are unhappy with the Communist regime.”
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“China already faces a demographic crisis. Its population is aging and now declining, with its social safety net increasingly strained. The CCP, long reliant on economic growth for its legitimacy, faces the possibility that China will grow old before it grows rich. Bright young people drive economic growth in any nation. Their exodus would doom China to languish in economic and demographic turmoil.
Allowing more Chinese people into American would not only harm a perceived adversary; it would actively help the United States as well. Immigrants have been an economic engine for America. Immigrants and their children make up a disproportionate share of patent holders, as well as nearly half of the founders of Fortune 500 companies. Even an average year of immigration to the U.S., according to some estimates, increases GDP by as much as $72 billion.”
“As Cato Institute Policy Analyst Daniel Raisbeck has written for Reason, Plan Colombia’s aid did initially “help the Colombian military to severely weaken the once-formidable [Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC)]. But Plan Colombia’s anti-narcotics element was an unqualified failure.” Per Raisbeck:
“By 2006, “coca cultivation and cocaine production levels (had) increased by about 15 and 4 percent, respectively.” In 2019, there were more hectares cultivated with coca leaf in Colombia (212,000) than two decades earlier (160,000).
The so-called FARC “dissidents,” thousands of fighters who did not demobilize in 2016, still control large swathes of the cocaine business. They wage constant combat over production areas and export routes against other guerrilla groups and criminal organizations, including several with links to Mexican drug cartels.”
American counternarcotics efforts yielded similarly bad results in Afghanistan. The U.S. spent about $9 billion to tackle Afghanistan’s opium and heroin production, only for the effort to be “perhaps the most feckless” of “all the failures in Afghanistan,” according to The Washington Post’s analysis of confidential government interviews and documents. By 2018, Afghan farmers were growing poppies on four times as much land as they were in 2002. Operation Iron Tempest, meant to cripple Afghanistan’s opium production labs, folded within a year. “Many of the suspected labs turned out to be empty, mud-walled compounds,” noted the Post.
The war on drugs has helped turn Latin America into the most violent region in the world. Criminalization has led to the proliferation of black market activity, a boom in many countries’ prison populations, and increased corruption across Latin America. It’s also contributed to a huge number of homicides: At least half of the violent deaths in Colombia, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, and Venezuela are estimated to be drug-related, according to the World Economic Forum.
Despite those failures, many Republicans still want to use war on terror tactics to fight Mexican cartels.”
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“The increase in overdose deaths among Americans is tragic and obviously a problem. It isn’t one that will be solved by fighting the war on drugs just a little bit harder. It certainly isn’t one that will be solved by bombing a neighboring country against its wishes, risking further escalation. It requires being realistic about the policies that have made drug use more dangerous. “That starts with bipartisan support for prohibition,” writes Reason’s Jacob Sullum, “which creates a black market where the quality and potency of drugs are highly variable and unpredictable.”
Simply stopping the supply of drugs into the country is an impossible task, as decades of prohibition show. Republicans would be far better off embracing harm-reduction strategies rather than pushing for another episode of military adventurism that is destined to fail.”
“The modest increase in housing production can be largely explained by how marginal many of these missing middle reforms have been.
Often, cities will legalize missing middle housing without allowing the new multi-unit buildings to be much larger than the single-family homes they’d replace. That means a builder faces all the costs of tearing down an old unit without the ability to add much additional revenue-generating floor space.”
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“Another problem facing missing middle home construction is a whole thicket of nonzoning rules and practices that assume new construction will either be single-family homes or larger apartment buildings.