Challenging Opinions >>

Andrew Branca is a lifelong NRA member, a lawyer who consults on self-defence law and the author of The Law of Self Defense: The Indispensable Guide to the Armed Citizen.

During our discussion, I metioned the Dickey Amendment, which forbids the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from advocating or promoting gun control, but has widely been interpreted as preventing the CDC from studying the health effects of gun ownership.

I also mentioned sutdies that show that owning a gun does not reduce the chance of being the victim of a gun attack, and that gun ownership is not associated with a reduction in crime.

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Back in episode

107, I talked to David Dayen on the Economics of vaping, particularly the

huge expansion in the market reach and the valuation of the market leader,

Juul.

At the time we noted that Juul say that

they are a healthier alternative to smoking, that even if it isn’t healthy, it

is healthier. They are saving people

from the worst effects of their addiction. But the suspicion was that, although

they denied it, rather than reducing the number of smokers, they are targeting

children to expand the number of people addicted to nicotine.

Some information that has been uncovered

since then doesn’t exactly reassure the people who might have doubted their

word. Documents presented to the House Oversight Subcommittee on Economic and

Consumer Policy show just what Juul has been doing to not target children with

their products.

Let’s be clear here – the suspicion is that

Juul, now owned by the same company that makes Marlboro cigarettes – is trying

to get children addicted to nicotine before they can make a mature decision as

to whether that is something they want in their life. Research shows that

almost all smokers who get addicted to nicotine do so before the age of 18, and

the small portion who take up smoking as adults a...

Will Wilkinson is the vice president for research at the Niskanen Center.

He’s also and a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. He was previously, a correspondent for The Economist and a research fellow at the Cato Institute.

We discussed his research paper The Density Divide: Urbanization, Polarization, and Populist Backlash.

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Most of you won’t have listened to a radio

service called Voice of America, and

there’s a good reason for that. Actually, it’s not just radio any more; they

describe themselves as a multi-media service. And it’s owned and funded by the

US government. So why haven’t you heard it? Because that’s not allowed.

Not to say that you’re not allowed to tune

in, but they, VOA as they’re known, aren’t allowed to broadcast to you. In the

good old days of shortwave radio broadcasts, that meant that they would aim

their broadcasts at other countries, never at the USA. The main targets were Central

and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia, Russia, and the Middle East,

and their job was to promote the American point of view. It’s a propaganda

station.

They’ve never really been that successful,

they don’t have the brand recognition that the BBC World Service has, certainly

not the level of trust. Like their Cold War competitors Radio Moscow, they had

a pretty heavy-handed bias that undermined their credibility.

By the way, you shouldn’t confuse Voice of

America with Voice of Europe, which is a clickbait conspiracy website. Anyway,

the reason that VOA isn’t aimed at you, even though you can hear it if you

really want to, is because the US constitution is a bit sniffy about the

Raymond Ibrahim is the author of Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War Between Islam and the West.

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Let’s do a bit of science.

Maybe, like me, you have had various social

media invaded by people making all sorts of complaints about something called

5G. That’s the newest mobile data standard. Unless you are really special, that

doesn’t work on your phone yet, but the networks are being installed, and newer

handsets using them will be available soon, probably starting at the top end of

the price range.

5G just means the fifth generation, the

first was basic cellphones, the second was text messaging, 4G allows internet,

and 5G will allow you to control the space shuttle, or something. If you click

too far into Facebook or YouTube, you’d be forgiven for thinking that an apocalypse

was planned, something between the worst nightmares of the antivaxxers and

those people who say that their thoughts are controlled by the CIA via a chip

in their brain. So I really just want to give the basic scientific information

here.

5G is data transmitted over radio waves.

Just like any other form of data transmitted through the air, cellphone voice

or data signals, FM radio, broadcast TV or your home wifi. All of them are,

technically, radiation. So is light – by which I mean the light that your eyes

use to see things around you, and so are magnetic waves, the ones that spin the

needle on a compass.

Some conspiracy theorists have been saying

vague things that imply that 5G uses some weird special type of radiation that

is dangerous or untested. In reality, 5G uses frequencies that are already in

use by home wifi systems and digital TV broadcasts. Sure, the content of that

signal is new technology, but the content of the signal has no relevance to the

frequency it’s broadcast on.

So where does that all collide with radiation that we know can kill us? Basically, the electromagnetic spectrum is split in two halves – ionizing radiation and non-ionizing radiation. Non-ionizing radiation is basically too weak t...

John Hawkins is a writer for Bizpaq review, Brass Pills and is the editor Right Wing News. He’s also the author of 101 Things All Young Adults Should Know.

We talked about John’s article The Best Stats & Quotes From ‘Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse’, John’s take on the findings of that book. I mentioned the fact that the number of hours needed to work at minimum age to pay college tuition has increased about tenfold in the last 40 years, and the book Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam.

Here is the comparison between the minimum wage and average university tuition costs:

And this are the changes since 1979 in average wages, the wages of the top one per cent, and productivity.

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If, when I say TikTok, your mind goes to a

clock, then you are not in the demographic for TikTok.

TikTok is a video-sharing app, with a very

young demographic. It’s got something approaching a billion users, and that’s

not counting the users of a parallel app in China called Douyin, which is

basically identical, except firewalled off, to comply with Chinese censorship

laws.

To put that in context, Facebook took

almost eight years to get to a billion users. TikTok won’t be three years old

until September.

The videos are limited to 15 seconds in

duration, and as you might expect they normally center on music and youth

culture. If you want to feel old, download it and swipe through a few videos.

Users who get more than 1,

Greg Shupak has a PhD in Literary Studies and teaches Media Studies at the University of Guelph in Toronto. He regularly writes analysis of politics and media for outlets including Electronic Intifada, In These Times, Jacobin, and the website Fairness and accuracy in reporting.

His book, The Wrong Story Palestine, Israel, And The Media is available from OR Books.

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That’s audio from an Egyptian news channel called Extra news, it’s in Arabic of course. That clip is 17 seconds long, and it’s a news item that, in Arabic, contained 42 words. As I understand it, it was broadcast only once on Extra News, the exact same number of times that it was broadcast on all other Egyptian news channels.

And with the exact same text. To the word.

And, every Egyptian newspaper ran the same story, 42 words long, word for word.

The news was about the death of Mohamed

Morsi. Morsi was the first, and so far only, democratically elected president

of Egypt. He won the 2012 elections after the Tahrir Square protests,

part of the Arab

Spring uprising and that swept through the Arab world nearly a decade ago

now.

The Arab Spring was a protest by a mixture

of people, democrats, liberals, economic reformists, and Islamists who were

against the corrupt elites that ruled – and in many cases still rule – the Arab

countries. The Egyptian army, the real controlling force in the country, saw

the way things were going, deposed the longtime dictator, and allowed largely

free elections.

They didn’t go to script. Morsi led the Freedom

and Justice Party, and organization affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood.

The party weren’t Islamic extremists, they confirmed that they were happy for

women and Egypt’s minority Christians to serve in government, but they were by

no means what people who wanted Egypt to move towards the western democratic

model would have hoped for,

Mark Vernon is a psychotherapist and writer, with a degree in physics, before two degrees in theology, and a PhD in philosophy. He’s written books covering subjects from friendship and belief, to wellbeing and love.

His next book, A Secret History of Christianity, is published at the end of August by John Hunt publishing .

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It’s worth paying attention to what’s been

happening in Hong Kong.

In case you don’t know, Hong Kong was a

tiny British colony, it’s one of the most densely populated places in the world,

even though still keeps some rural areas; it crams its people into a city that

uses every square centimeter to the utmost.

In 1898, Britain obtained a 99-year lease on

what’s called the New Territories, and those of you who are quick at math will

have worked out that in 1997, they had to hand the territory back to the

by-then-communist China.

But Hong Kong was a roaring capitalist

success story, and China didn’t want to go killing any golden-egg-laying geese,

so Deng Xiaoping agreed a form of government called one country, two

systems. Basically, that meant that China would remain a communist

dictatorship, Hong Kong would remain a mostly-democratic and totally capitalist

territory, with a strong independent judiciary, even though Beijing would have

ultimate sovereignty.

Don’t get starry-eyed about this, many of

the elected officials know that they can take democratic principles so far and

no further. The rule of law is much stronger and politics and the media are

much, much freer in Hong Kong than in China, but that freedom is tempered in

part by a knowledge that if they exercise it too much, it might not last.

One example was the case of the staff of

Causeway Bay Books; this was a Hong Kong bookstore that sold books about

mainland Chinese politics which would be strictly ba...

Justin Strekal political director at Norml.

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I mentioned last week that I would talk

about the earthquake – earthquakes really – in UK politics. In particular that

Nigel Farage’s new party, the Brexit Party won the European

Parliament elections in the UK by a mile last month.

They did win by a mile, but it’s important

not to get carried way. They won by getting 30 per cent of the vote. That was

way more than any other party, but of course nothing like a majority, and a

fair way below what was predicted by pollsters. But it has still upended

politics, and let’s not forget that was a stunning result for a party that was

only a month old.

But that only tells half the story. The

party that came second was the Liberal Democrats – a centrist party, very

pro-European. They got a huge increase in their normally tiny vote with a very

simple slogan. Stop Brexit – Vote LibDem.

Third came the opposition Labour party, and fourth came the Green Party. Have

you noticed what’s missing? The Conservative Party, Theresa May’s party, the

government party, came fifth. She got less than nine per cent of the vote.

But that’s the European Parliament elections,

a second-order election, a chance for the voters to let fly, it’s probably

going to have no effect at all and the turnout was low, so we can safely ignore

the result – right? Not quite.

Opinion

polls for UK government elections have taken a decisive turn. The Brexit

Party doesn’t do so well; it’s still doing impressively, but the real story is

how British Politics have been totally upended.

The Liberal Democrats are in first place in

the polls for the real, grown-up election, for a British parliament, with the

Brexit Party in second place, and Labour and the Conservatives coming third and

fourth. In a US context, that’s a bit like the Libertarian Party and the Green

Bruce Schneier is a public-interest technologist. He’s been writing about security issues for more than 20 years, and he’s a Special Advisor to IBM Security, a fellow and lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and a board member of Electronic Frontier Foundation.

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A couple of quite similar stories caught my

eye in the past while.

The first was about a German MP

called Markus Frohnmaier. He was elected to the Bundestag, the German

parliament for the far-right AfD party in 2017.

A consortium of journalists from the BBC, German

news magazine Der Spiegel, and TV station ZDF and the Italian La Repubblica

newspaper got a leaked email from Petr Premyak, a former Russian spy who is

also a former member of the Russian parliament. The email, which Premyak

confirmed is genuine, but says he didn’t draft, was sent a couple of months

before Frohnmaier was elected.

It contains a document assessing the state

of public opinion in Germany and analyzing how to influence it in favor of

Russia.

It also refers to Markus Frohnmaier. Frohnmaier,

for a bit of background is quite young, only 28 now; he was 26 when he was

elected to parliament.  He has very frequently

spoken against the EU sanctions on Russia imposed after the invasion of areas

of Ukraine; he has also made trips to Crimea, the Ukrainian territory illegally

annexed by Russia in 2014, and to areas of eastern Ukraine controlled by

pro-Russian separatists and Russian special forces.

The leaked document says that Frohnmaier is

– quote “our own absolutely controlled” politician, and it goes on to predict –

rightly as it turned out – that he had a good chance of getting elected, and

discusses how Russian money could be used to him get elected.

The second

story is about Austria’s FPÖ party. They’re one of the most successful

far-right parties in Europe; they are in coalition government with that

country’s conservative party. Or they were, until a secretly-recorded video of Heinz-Chris...

Grayson Quay is a freelance writer. His work has been published in The Washington Times, Reason.com, National Interest, Townhall and others. He is also MA candidate at Georgetown University Master’s Degree candidate.

Aaron Naparstek is a cohost of the War on Cars podcast, and also the founder of Streetsblog.org.

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There have been a couple of stories about

facial recognition. This audio is from a BBC

report where the police set up a van with cameras filming passersby and

searching for records on them based on facial recognition. One man decided that

he didn’t like that, and pulled his sweater up over his mouth and nose to

frustrate the camera system; the police stopped him, forced him to be

photographed, and fined him £90, about $115 for what they called disorderly

conduct.

There was no suggestion that he was guilty

of any crime, at least of any other crime, if you call not wanting to be filmed

a crime.

This was a trial, the police brought a BBC

camera crew along with them to film the demonstration, and it was notable that

three other people were arrested when the cameras, and the associated computer

system recognized them as people who had outstanding warrants against them.

Compare that to the

story another British man, this time in the French port city of Calais who

will go on trial shortly for an incident that started when police noticed that

he was filming them. He says that the police attacked a woman he was with

without provocation; the two of them were recording police behavior.

There is an ongoing dispute at migrant

camps around Calais, where volunteers distributing food to migrants say that

they are suffering intense harassment from the French police. Amnesty

International have said that the charges are an abuse of process, and should be

dropped. The man faces large fines and up to five years in prison if he is

convicted.

This has echoes of the Glik v Cunniffe case

in the United States, where the Supreme Court ruled that citizens have the right

to film public officials, including police, who are working in public. There is