Month: April 2013

U-2 Spy Planes Used for What?

Over at the Huffington Post, Radley Balko has been promoting his upcoming book Rise of the Warrior Cop with a “Raid of the Day” featuring highlighting outrageous overreach by police.

A few days ago he highlighted raids undertaken in the mid-1980s as part of California’s Campaign Against Marijuana Planting (CAMP) initiative. Along with the raids themselves is the level of coordination with the US military to plan the raids,

It effectively turned parts of California into a military zone. CAMP sent U-2 spy planes over the skies to search for pot, then sent — literally — black helicopters full of armed National Guard troops, drug cops, and sometimes even volunteers to cut down the plants. Anyone who happened to be nearby could be detained, often at gunpoint.

According to a 1987 LA Times story, the U-2 spy planes didn’t work out very well,

The federal Drug Enforcement Administration, which takes part in CAMP, acknowledges using infrared devices to spot cocaine labs in the jungles of Latin America, but DEA officials insist that efforts in 1983 to draw an infrared map of California’s marijuana plantations from a high-flying U-2 spy plane were unsuccessful.

The U-2 costs about $30,000/hour to operate, so that was likely a costly failure (like the entire war on drugs).

Britain’s NHS Spends Millions on Homeopathic Nonsense

Interesting report from the Telegraph that the UK’s new Government Chief Science Advisor Sir Mark Walport attacked homeopathic remedies as the pseudoscience they are,

My view scientifically is absolutely clear: homeopathy is nonsense, it is non-science. . . . My advice to ministers is clear: that there is no science in homeopathy. The most it can have is a placebo effect – it is then a political decision whether they spend money on it or not.

The British Homoeopathic Association estimates that the UK’s National Health System spends 4 million pounds each year on homeopathic treatments. That is, thankfully, a tiny fraction of the NHS budget, which is projected to be 108.9 billion pounds for 2012/2013.

But while it may be a drop in the bucket compared to total spending, it is odd that money is allocated for such well known nonsense at all. As physician and former MP Evan Harris put the case against homeopathy in 2009,

It is fundamentally wrong that a treatment that’s known not to be effective, that’s known not to work in any meaningful way beyond the placebo effect, is being given some form of stamp of approval, even for the modest claims that are made of this product by an organisation that is founded on scientific tests of effectiveness.

Superman PSA: Never Say Yes to A Cigarette

In this 30 second PSA from the early 1980s, Superman saves a group of kids from a cigarette pusher…whom he then apparently murders by tossing into space.

And that’s not even the weird part. At the end of the PSA, Superman announces he can see the harm that cigarettes do to the human body thanks to his x-ray vision and then proceeds to do an x-ray vision sweep of the kids.

So, in summary–cigarettes: bad. Random x-ray sweeps of your body by alien visitors: good