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RANGER: 'We've been told to make life as difficult for people as we can. It's disgusting'...


(Top headline, 5th story, link)

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Related stories:

WIRED SHUT: BARRICADE AT WWII MEMORIAL REINFORCED...
Military keeps Camp David open; Halts NFL, baseball coverage to troops overseas...
Park Service Shuts Down Private Inn...
PHOTOS: Armed agents turn visitors away...
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Debt ceiling fight dates to Founding Fathers...
COSTA: Boehner looking to temper expectations...
WH asks for shutdown sob stories...
CHRIS WALLACE: Message is 'bull'...

In National Review Online, Kevin Williamson writes about a very important economic concept – the Social Value of Gazillionaires. Kevin explains:

While the Left rages about economic inequality, a phrase with a very elastic meaning, few people understand what I like to call the Social Value of Gazillionaires (SVG). And it is easy to be so blinded by resentment and envy — to say nothing of good taste in the matter of a Donald Trump or a Paris Hilton — that one completely misses SVG. Seeing for sale a $130 million condominium in Manhattan, a $4 million sports car, or a $2.5 million wristwatch, and reflecting that there are very poor and miserable people in this world, it is very easy to make the intellectual error of believing that the latter is a consequence of the former. It is not. In fact, something very close to the opposite is the case.

For example, there is a well-established pattern in automobile innovation in which safety and performance features are developed for high-end cars and then work their way down through the lines until they become standard equipment on ordinary vehicles. (Sometimes these are developed for non-production vehicles, especially racing cars.) The technology that coordinates seatbelt pre-tensioning with airbag deployment was first developed for the seriously expensive Mercedes S-Class sedan in the early 1980s, and within a few years Porsche was offering a similar system as standard equipment. Chrysler joined in a year later, and today very modestly priced cars, such as the Ford Fiesta, are available with side airbags and related safety features that were not available at any price in the 1980s. That’s SVG in action. Things like antilock brakes and modern throttle systems have followed similar patterns of development. In the 1990s, a single high-end sports car, the Acura NSX, was responsible for introducing a half a dozen important technical innovations into the marketplace. How many non-rich people are alive today because rich people wanted a higher level of safety in 1981 — and were willing to pay for it — is anybody’s guess, but the number is surely large. There was no philanthropic motive there, to be sure, but the best social innovations do not rely on philanthropic motives, which are notoriously unreliable.

The unstated corollary here is: Sometimes, poor people will die in automobile accidents because they are poor. Some people cannot afford Volvos. But the cars they can afford are better, more reliable, and safer because of innovations born of the development of the cars they cannot afford.

Scarcity is real, and it cannot be negotiated away. The only real cure for it is prosperity. “Prosperity” is one of those words that politicians like to use in a vague way, but we can be more specific. One indicator of meaningful prosperity is the relatively rapid passing of goods and services originally developed for the highest end of the market into general consumption as former luxury goods become commonplace. That is a process that really only happens under free enterprise — and, particularly, where conditions are favorable to heavy investment in productive resources.

MP: The value and contribution of gazillionaires (or “the rich” or the “top 1%”) to society, and the role they play in improving the lives of everybody in society, especially the lower-income and middle-income groups, has gone unappreciated for too long. Thanks to Kevin Williamson for pointing out the “Social Value of Gazillionaires,” a group to whom we all owe a debt of gratitude for significantly increasing our standard of living. If we started to recognize, acknowledge and appreciate the tremendous benefits that gazillionaires (and the top 1%) bestow on society, maybe we could all be just a little bit less obsessed with income inequality. In fact, we should welcome and encourage as many gazillionaires as possible for their contribution to the collective good, even if more gazillionaires increases “income inequality.” As far as I’m concerned, the “more gazillionaires the better,” for the social value they create for all of us – my life is much better off because of them.

Daniel J. Mitchell

There have been some unfortunate and dark days in American history, but what was the worst day?

Some obvious choices include December 7, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and September 11, when the terrorists launched their despicable attack.

Another option (somewhat tongue in cheek) might be January 20 since Republican partisans would say that’s the day that both Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama became President while Democratic partisans would say that’s the day Ronald Reagan became President.

But allow me to suggest that today, October 3, should be a candidate for America’s worst day.

Why? Because on this day in 1913, one of America’s worst Presidents, Woodrow Wilson, signed into law the Revenue Act of 1913, which imposed the income tax.

The law signed that day by President Wilson, to be fair, wasn’t that awful. The top tax rate was only 7 percent, the tax form was only 2 pages, and the entire tax code was only 400 pages. And a big chunk of the revenue actually was used to lower the tax burden on international trade (the basic tariff rate dropped form 40 percent to 25 percent).

But just as tiny acorns become large oak trees, small taxes become big taxes and simple tax codes become complex monstrosities. And that’s exactly what happened in the United States.

We now have a top tax rate of 39.6 percent, and it’s actually much higher than that when you include the impact of other taxes, as well as the pervasive double taxation of saving and investment.

And the relatively simply tax law of 1913 has metastasized into 74,000 pages of Byzantine complexity.

Not to mention that the tax code has become one of the main sources of political corruption in Washington, impoverishing us while enriching the politicians, lobbyists, bureaucrats, and interest groups. Or the oppressive and dishonest IRS.

However, even though I take second place to nobody in my disdain for the income tax, the worst thing about that law is not the tax rates, the double taxation, or the complexity. The worst thing is that the income tax enabled the modern welfare state.

Before the income tax, politicians had no way to finance big government. Their only significant pre-1913 sources of revenue were tariffs and excise taxes, and they couldn’t raise those tax rates too high because of Laffer Curve effects (something that modern-day politicians sometimes still discover).

Once the income tax was adopted, though, it became a lot easier to finance subsidies, handouts, and redistribution. As you can see from the chart, the federal government used to be very small during peacetime.

But as the decades have passed, the Leviathan state in Washington has grown. And in the absence of genuine entitlement reform, it’s just a matter of time before the United States morphs into a bankrupt European-style welfare state.

And as government becomes bigger and bigger, diverting more and more resources from the productive sector of the economy, we can expect more stagnation and misery.

That’s why October 3 is an awful day in American history. All the bad results described above were made possible by the income tax.

P.S. It’s totally off topic, but I don’t think we should commemorate September 11. I’d much rather we celebrate May 1, which is the day that Osama bin Laden became fish food.

P.P.S. If the income tax facilitated today’s bloated government, it should go without saying that giving politicians another big source of revenue would lead to an even bigger burden of government. That’s why the value-added tax is such an awful idea.

P.P.P.S. Government also used to be very small in Western Europe before the income tax. Indeed, it was during that period when European nations became rich.

P.P.P.P.S. One could also argue that February 3 is the worst day in history because that’s when Delaware ratified the 16th Amendment, thus making an income tax constitutional.

We already wrote about the basics of Lavabit's Ladar Levison standing up to the feds, however, the full filing has now been released, and (on top of that), Kevin Poulsen has updated his story with more details, so it's worth digging in a bit. Lavabit was hit with an initial pen register, which it refused, leading to the order to hand over the SSL keys. The new details show that Lavabit explained to the judge that giving up Lavabit's SSL keys wouldn't just let the feds spy on Snowden, but all of Lavabit's customers, and for obvious reasons, the company had a huge problem with that:

“The privacy of … Lavabit’s users are at stake,” Lavabit attorney Jesse Binnall told Hilton. “We’re not simply speaking of the target of this investigation. We’re talking about over 400,000 individuals and entities that are users of Lavabit who use this service because they believe their communications are secure. By handing over the keys, the encryption keys in this case, they necessarily become less secure.”

And it becomes clear that Levison then was actually willing to abide by the initial pen register, to basically figure out a way to just tap Snowden, but at this point the government was no longer willing to stop there. The government pushed for getting the SSL key, basically promising not to abuse it:

“We can assure the court that the way that this would operate, while the metadata stream would be captured by a device, the device does not download, does not store, no one looks at it,” [Prosecutor James] Trump said. “It filters everything, and at the back end of the filter, we get what we’re required to get under the order.”

“So there’s no agents looking through the 400,000 other bits of information, customers, whatever,” Trump added. “No one looks at that, no one stores it, no one has access to it.”

“All right,” said [Judge Claude] Hilton. “Well, I think that’s reasonable.”

The judge then made a ruling that should cast a massive chill over anyone setting up private communications services:

[The government's] clearly entitled to the information that they're seeking and just because you-all have set up a system that makes that difficult, that doesn't in any way lessen the government's right to receive that information just as they could from any telephone company or any other e-mail source that could provide it easily."

Yikes. So, even if you set up a secure communication system, this judge says that you have to let the feds wiretap it.

Somewhat amusingly, Lavabit tried to comply "by turning over the private SSL keys as an 11 page printout in 4-point type." The feds complained that "the FBI would have to manually input all 2,560 characters, and one incorrect keystroke in this laborious process would render the FBI collection system incapable of collecting decrypted data." Poor, poor FBI. The judge has no problem putting a massive burden on Lavabit, but asking the FBI to actually do some data entry is too onerous? Yup. Apparently. The court then ordered Levison to provide a more useful electronic copy, which then resulted in the $5,000/day fine for failing to live up to that, and then the closure of the site.

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'WHY WOULD WE WANT TO' HELP ONE KID WITH CANCER?


(Main headline, 1st story, link)

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I mentioned in an earlier article that the Administration is threatening to close US Forest Service parks it does not even fund or run, privately operated parks that happen to have the Federal government as a landlord.  In fact, in our case, we pay the US Forest Service between 8 and 22 percent of revenues as a concession fee, so by threatening to close us it is costing them, not saving them extra money.

Apparently, the NPS is already doing this:

National Park Officials closed down the educational Claude Moore Colonial Farm near the CIA in McLean, Va., even though the federal government doesn't fund or staff the park popular with children and schools. Just because the privately-operated park is on Park Service land, making the federal government simply its landlord, the agency decided to close it.

A Claude Moore Colonial Farm official said that the privately-funded staff is on the job Wednesday, but barred from letting anybody visit the historically accurate buildings or animals. Anna Eberly, the managing director, sent out an email decrying the decision and rude National Park Service staff handling the closure.

Pointing to Park Service claims that parks have to be closed because the agency can’t afford staff during the government closure, Eberly wrote: “What utter crap. We have operated the Farm successfully for 32 years after the NPS cut the Farm from its budget in 1980 and are fully staffed and prepared to open today. But there are barricades at the Pavilions and entrance to the Farm. And if you were to park on the grass and visit on your own, you run the risk of being arrested. Of course, that will cost the NPS staff salaries to police the Farm against intruders while leaving it open will cost them nothing.”

She added: “In all the years I have worked with the National Park Service, first as a volunteer for six years in Richmond where I grew up, then as an NPS employee at the for eight very long years and now enjoyably as managing director for the last 32 years — I have never worked with a more arrogant, arbitrary and vindictive group representing the NPS. I deeply apologize that we have to disappoint you today by being closed but know that we are working while the National Park Service is not — as usual.”

This is purely political -- it costs rather than saves the government money.

For several days now I have been highlighting article after article (here and here) where the only service downside of the government shutdown anyone can come up with is the closure of parks.  Here is another example, from the AP entitled "Lawmakers feeling heat from Government Shutdown".  Its all parks:

Some 800,000 federal workers deemed nonessential were staying home again Wednesday in the first partial shutdown since the winter of 1995-96.

Across the nation, America roped off its most hallowed symbols: the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, the Statue of Liberty in New York, Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, the Washington Monument.

Its natural wonders — the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, the Smoky Mountains and more — put up “Closed” signs and shooed campers away.

Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia said he was getting pleas from businesses that rely on tourists. “The restaurants, the hotels, the grocery stores, the gasoline stations, they’re all very devastated with the closing of the parks,” he said.

The far-flung effects reached France, where tourists were barred from the U.S. cemetery overlooking the D-Day beaches at Normandy. Twenty-four military cemeteries abroad have been closed.

Only 22,000 of those 800,000 run parks.  Apparently none of the others do anything we will miss.  Oh, they come up with one new one:

Even fall football is in jeopardy. The Defense Department said it wasn’t clear that service academies would be able to participate in sports, putting Saturday’s Army vs. Boston College and Air Force vs. Navy football games on hold, with a decision to be made Thursday.

Eek!  I joke about this but I fear that today this is going to bite me right in the butt.  Our company operates campgrounds on land we lease from the US Forest Service.  Since we pay all expenses of the operation, take no government money, and employ no government workers, we have never closed in a shutdown and the US Forest Service confirmed at noon yesterday we would not have to close this time.  But apparently someone above the US Forest Service somewhere in the Administration is proposing to reverse this, and illegally close us.  My guess is that they realize parks are the only thing the public misses, and so the Administration trying to see if it can close more of them, even ones that are operated privately and off the government budget.

Update:  This is very similar to what is happening in DC.  By trying to close us, the USFS is actually costing themselves more money (since we pay rent to them based on our revenues) with the only goal being to make the closure worse.  The Administration has ordered the same thing to occur in DC parks, where they are spending far more money "closing" monuments than they do just having them open all the time

Yesterday, the sight of a group of World War II veterans storming the barricaded monument built in their honor in Washington, D.C., became the buzzworthy moment from the first day of our federal shutdown.  The open-air, unmanned outdoor memorial had been barricaded to keep people from "visiting" due to the government shutdown, though there was no real (as in “non-political”) reason to have done so. Barricades certainly wouldn’t prevent vandals from busting in there at night if they wanted to. It was an absurd, petty move.

This morning, Charlie Spiering of the Washington Examiner returned to the memorial to find a gaggle of “essential” government workers there to barricade it once again. He tweeted that the employees fled after cameras started filming them working, but then came back to attach “closed” signs. A couple of them appear to be talking to the media. The barricades are apparently there, but have not been tied together and are therefore easily removed.

….. are all from Thomas Sowell on medical costs, free lunches, free red tape, etc.

1. If we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals and pharmaceutical drugs now, how can we afford to pay for doctors, hospitals and pharmaceutical drugs, in addition to a new federal bureaucracy to administer a government-run medical system?

2. Economics and politics confront the same fundamental problem: What everyone wants adds up to more than there is. Market economies deal with this problem by confronting individuals with the costs of producing what they want, and letting those individuals make their own trade-offs when presented with prices that convey those costs. That leads to self-rationing, in the light of each individual’s own circumstances and preferences.

Politics deals with the same problem by making promises that cannot be kept, or which can be kept only by creating other problems that cannot be acknowledged when the promises are made.

3. There is no free lunch– even though politicians get elected by promising free lunches. A free lunch in medical care is one of the most dangerous illusions of all.

4. Do you seriously believe that millions more people can be given medical care and vast new bureaucracies created to administer payment for it, with no additional costs?

Just as there is no free lunch, there is no free red tape. Bureaucrats have to eat, just like everyone else, and they need a place to live and some other amenities. How do you suppose the price of medical care can go down when the costs of new government bureaucracies are added to the costs of the medical treatment itself?

And where are the extra doctors going to come from, to treat the millions of additional patients? Training more people to become doctors is not free. Politicians may ignore costs but ignoring those costs will not make them go away. With bureaucratically controlled medical care, you are going to need more doctors, just to treat a given number of patients, because time that is spent filling out government forms is time that is not spent treating patients. And doctors have the same 24 hours in the day as everybody else.

When you add more patients to more paperwork per patient, you are talking about still more costs. How can that lower medical costs? But although that may be impossible, politics is the art of the impossible. All it takes is rhetoric and a public that does not think beyond the rhetoric they hear.

If you were around during the reign of Joe Nacchio at Qwest, you already should be aware that he was not particularly well-liked. He was brash and obnoxious and often rubbed people the wrong way. There's a famous story, for example, of him calling up an executive at US West, a company that Qwest bought, which had a building directly across the street from Qwest's headquarters. Moments after the buyout closed, Nacchio got the exec on the phone and supposedly told him he had 15 minutes to change the sign on the building from US West to Qwest. Qwest collapsed in a somewhat spectacular manner not long after that, with some comparing it to the Enron collapse -- a lot of hype and stock pumping built on very little substance. A few years later, Nacchio was famously convicted of insider trading -- and certainly many people who had witnessed his earlier antics reveled in that result.

However, it was only later that it started to come out that Nacchio was alone among all of the major telco execs to tell the NSA to get lost when they came calling, demanding the ability to basically tap Qwest's entire network. For years, Nacchio has insisted that the entire lawsuit against him was retaliation for his refusal. When he first made those claims, it sounded far fetched and ridiculous. However, in the intervening years, as more and more details of the NSA's activities have become clear, Nacchio's initial arguments seem a hell of a lot more plausible.

It turns out that Nacchio was just released from prison after his 54 month sentence was completed. The WSJ has an odd but entertaining (and unfortunately paywalled -- though, you can get around it if you Google the title) article about his life in prison, where he apparently came out much healthier than he went in (lots of exercise) and is now best buddies with some former drug dealers who had his back in prison. One of whom, who goes by the name Spoonie, calls Nacchio "Joe-ski-luv" and says that they're best friends. "If he ever needs a lung or a bone, I'm there." Right.

But, more interesting is the tidbit further down about the NSA stuff:

Mr. Nacchio said he still believes his insider-trading prosecution was government retaliation for rebuffing requests in 2001 from the National Security Agency to access his customers' phone records. His plans to use that belief as a defense at trial never materialized; some of the evidence he wanted to use was deemed classified and barred from being introduced.

To Mr. Nacchio, the revelations of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who leaked documents saying the agency monitors the email and phone records of Americans, have justified his own stance. He contended the NSA's request was illegal.

"I feel vindicated," he said. "I never broke the law, and I never will."

An NSA spokeswoman declined to comment.

I would imagine that Nacchio could add quite a bit of useful information to the ongoing debate. And, in fact, it appears he intends to do so, with plans to write a book about "Americans' loss of liberty based on his experiences with the NSA and other government agencies." I look forward to reading it.

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While Apple has been touting its new TouchID fingerprint scanner as more secure, many people with experience in biometrics are quick to note that the problem with biometric security is once it's cracked, you're kind of in trouble, since you can't just change your fingerprint/retina/voice etc. And, indeed, it took almost no time at all for the biometrics hacking team of the Chaos Computer Club to crack TouchID "using everyday means." You can see a video of them getting into a new iPhone with a different finger: It appears that they've used the same basic method as has been used to hack fingerprint scanners in the past -- get a high quality image of the user's fingerprint and then:

The resulting image is then cleaned up, inverted and laser printed with 1200 dpi onto transparent sheet with a thick toner setting. Finally, pink latex milk or white woodglue is smeared into the pattern created by the toner onto the transparent sheet. After it cures, the thin latex sheet is lifted from the sheet, breathed on to make it a tiny bit moist and then placed onto the sensor to unlock the phone.

The only "difference" here is that they needed to use a higher resolution in the printing to match the higher resolution of Apple's scanner. CCC points out, as others have in the past, that this should remind people that fingerprint scanning is not very secure.

"We hope that this finally puts to rest the illusions people have about fingerprint biometrics. It is plain stupid to use something that you can't change and that you leave everywhere every day as a security token", said Frank Rieger, spokesperson of the CCC. "The public should no longer be fooled by the biometrics industry with false security claims. Biometrics is fundamentally a technology designed for oppression and control, not for securing everyday device access." Fingerprint biometrics in passports has been introduced in many countries despite the fact that by this global roll-out no security gain can be shown.

iPhone users should avoid protecting sensitive data with their precious biometric fingerprint not only because it can be easily faked, as demonstrated by the CCC team. Also, you can easily be forced to unlock your phone against your will when being arrested. Forcing you to give up your (hopefully long) passcode is much harder under most jurisdictions than just casually swiping your phone over your handcuffed hands.

It wasn't difficult to assume that this would happen. What's surprising is that Apple doesn't seem to have considered this fact.

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Andrew J. Coulson

Politico reports that U.S. education secretary Arne Duncan will address the Business Roundtable today, calling on the nation’s CEOs to “step up and promote the Obama administration’s education agenda.” That agenda is essentially a doubling-down on the policies of the past 50 years—further increases in federal pre-K spending, further centralization of school standards and testing, etc.

Before agreeing to go along, America’s business leaders should ask themselves: who should be learning from whom? Over the past half-century, which record is more worthy of emulation: that of federal government K-12 policy or that of the free enterprise system?

As an aid to their deliberations, I offer the graphics below:

Versus what economist Mark J. Perry calls “The Magic and Miracle of the Marketplace.” The image on the left is from the 1964 Sears Christmas catalogue. The goods on the right show what you can buy today for the inflation-adjusted cost of one of those vintage TVs (images courtsey of Mark J. Perry).

Discuss.

Over at Cryptome today there's an absolutely incredible exchange between the Justice Department's Brian Fallon (from the Office of Public Affairs -- basically a PR guy) and Brian Heath, an investigative reporter from USA Today. Heath had sent the DOJ a FOIA request to the DOJ's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) asking basically whether or not the OPR had been involved in any investigation concerning the recently declassified FISA Court order, about how the NSA had misled the FISA court and abused its capabilities repeatedly. It certainly seems reasonable to try to find out if the DOJ then investigated those abuses and the NSA's misrepresentations to the FISA court.

The DOJ claimed that there were no responsive documents -- which even by itself is quite incredible. Heath appears to have then followed up with Fallon at the DOJ to seek comments. Fallon's response by itself is stunning:

I have an answer from OPR, and a FISC judge. I am not providing it to you because all you will do is seek to write around it because you are biased in favor of the idea that an inquiry should have been launched. So I will save what I have for another outlet after you publish.

Basically, this is the DOJ giving the middle finger to Heath, telling him that they have answers to his questions, but won't give them to him in order to purposely try to make him look bad by giving those quotes to someone else. Heath, quite reasonably, responded that he's been perfectly patient in waiting for an answer, but if none is forthcoming, he'll write the story as he has it (which, from the FOIA request, suggests that the DOJ did absolutely nothing about the NSA's abuses and misrepresentations to the FISC).

Fallon responds that he's "done negotiating" and claims that he "will work with someone else afterwards explaining why what you reported is off base." So, not only is the DOJ not answering the reporter, it's telling the reporter that the reporter has incorrect information but the DOJ refuses to correct the reporter in order to make the reporter look bad. Heath points out that he's not "negotiating" he's just asking for answers to basic questions. And then the real issue comes out in the DOJ's reply:

You are not actually open-minded to the idea of not writing the story. You are running it regardless. I have information that undercuts your premise, and would provide it if I thought you were able to be convinced that your story is off base. Instead, I think that to provide it to you would just allow you to cover your bases, and factor it into a story you still plan to write. So I prefer to hold onto the information and use it after the fact, with a different outlet that is more objective about whether an OPR inquiry was appropriate

Yeah. The DOJ is saying that it has answers to a reporter's questions, which it knows adds to the public debate about the DOJ's response to the NSA's activities, but because it's trying to stifle the report, it won't share the info with him. This is incredible. It's a clear move by the DOJ to try to silence the press with an effective threat: "if you agree not to publish your article, then we'll explain why we did what we did. If you do publish your article, we'll make you look foolish."

This is incredibly childish and unprofessional behavior by Fallon and the DOJ. Remember how this is supposed to be "the most transparent administration in history"? Apparently the DOJ thinks that only means "we'll be transparent if you only agree to write nice stuff about us." That's not how it works.

Heath points out that Fallon is wrong -- if Heath just wanted to publish the story he would have done so already, without waiting for a comment from the DOJ. And then he points out the obvious:

You can’t seriously ask me not to publish something on the basis of information you won’t share

Either way, this seems to highlight (once again) how the federal government, and especially the DOJ, views journalists these days -- especially investigative journalists. It will do anything possible to intimidate them into not publishing stories that might embarrass the administration. That's not transparency, it's thuggery and intimidation.

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As an American with First Amendment rights, you'd probably assume that a "Free Speech Zone" would look something like this:

The blue on that map should represent areas where you can exercise your right to free speech. Unfortunately, for many college students, their "Free Speech Zone" shrinks considerably when on campus. One out of every six major colleges have designated "Free Speech Zones" where students are "permitted" to "enjoy" this Constitutional right, and even then there are restrictions. In these colleges, exercising your right to free speech means asking permission at least a couple of days in advance as well as having the administration "approve" your speech.

The latest example of confined and controlled speech comes to us courtesy of Modesto Junior College. As FIRE.org reports, a student found his exercise of free speech shut down on one of the worst days of the year for a college to assert its negative attitude towards the First Amendment.

In a stunning illustration of the attitude taken towards free speech by too many colleges across the United States, Modesto Junior College in California told a student that he could not pass out copies of the United States Constitution outside the student center on September 17, 2013—Constitution Day. Captured on video, college police and administrators demanded that Robert Van Tuinen stop passing out Constitution pamphlets and told him that he would only be allowed to pass them out in the college’s tiny free speech zone, and only after scheduling it several days or weeks ahead of time.

After 10 minutes of handing out these pamphlets, Van Tuinen was approached by a campus police officer. After some discussion regarding the ridiculousness of shutting down free speech on Constitution Day and Van Tuinen's repeated assertion of his rights, the campus cop tells him to take it up with administration.

[The officer sends out a little cheap shot before Van Tuinen moves on, telling him, "Look at you. You're shaking." This is a common cop tactic designed to both a) cast suspicion on the person and b) assert the officer's control of the situation. The fact that it's a byproduct of the fight-or-flight response is ignored. People speaking to armed authority figures will often appear nervous because that's how the human brain works. It's not solely a byproduct of fear or guilt. It's adrenaline being pumped with no available outlet.]

The response he receives from administration is no less ridiculous, considering it relies heavily on quoting policy rather than acknowledging the absurdity of shutting down free speech on Constitution Day. (As if it would be any less ridiculous on any other day of the year, but Constitution Day?)

Upon arriving at that office, Van Tuinen talks with administrator Christine Serrano, who tells him that because of “a time, place, and manner,” he can only pass out literature inside the “free speech area,” which she informs him is “in front of the student center, in that little cement area.” She asks him to fill out an application and asks to photocopy his student ID. Hauling out a binder, Serrano says that she has “two people on campus right now, so you’d have to wait until either the 20th, 27th, or you can go into October.” Van Tuinen protests that he wants to pass out the Constitution on Constitution Day, at which point Serrano dismissively tells him “you really don’t need to keep going on.”

So, now everything's clear. In a nation where free speech is one of the foundations of society, an American in a public American college (founded by legislation and infused with public money via grants) is restricted to "that little cement area" (see below) -- and then only with advance notice and permission. Free speech possibly available in October -- get your reservation in now!

As FIRE's Robert Shibley points out, there's really no way Modesto Junior College could have handled this situation any worse than it did.

“Virtually everything that Modesto Junior College could do wrong, it did do wrong. It sent police to enforce an unconstitutional rule, said that students could not freely distribute literature, placed a waiting period on free speech, produced an artificial scarcity of room for free speech with a tiny ‘free speech area,’ and limited the number of speakers on campus to two at a time. This was outrageous from start to finish. Every single person at Modesto responsible for enforcing this policy should have known better.”

Free speech isn't something you box up and dole out. It's the right of all citizens. Modesto Junior College should know this, being a public college, but has apparently decided it's much easier to avoid uncomfortable or unpopular speech by violating its students' First Amendment rights.



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My buddy James asks me to repost this Cafe entry from December 9, 2009.  I oblige.

Here’s a letter that I sent today to the Wall Street Journal:

Andrew Roberts’s review of Robert Sullivan’s biography of Thomas Babington Macaulay splendidly exposes the blinding biases that Sullivan brings to Lord Macaulay and his times (“An Eminent Victorian on Trial,” Dec. 7).  Persons interested in Macaulay should avoid Sullivan’s screed and instead study John Clive’s masterful 1973 biography, Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian.  Although Clive, like Sullivan, indulges in too much psychoanalysis for my taste, he paints a rich and compelling portrait of Macaulay.  This portrait reveals Macaulay to have been, if flawed, a truly great and good man – a man whose realism and genuine liberalism would serve us well today.

Macaulay was also prescient.  Writing in the 1840s, he refused to romanticize past times when (as he described matters) “to have a clean shirt once a week was a privilege reserved for the higher class of gentry” and when “men died faster in the purest country air than now die in the most pestilential lanes.”  Macaulay foresaw that “It may well be, in the twentieth century … that numerous comforts and luxuries which are now unknown, or confined to a few, may be within the reach of every diligent and thrifty workingman.  And yet it may then be the mode to assert that the increase of wealth and the progress of science have benefited the few at the expense of the many.”*

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux

* From the chapter entitled “The Delusion of Overrating the Happiness of Our Ancestors,” in T. B. Macaulay, The History of England (1847).

Martha Coakley, former Massachusetts Attorney General, is apparently running for Governor of that state after her failed bid to be Senator.

Walter Olson has a round-up of Coakley's various abuses of power, which start with her shameful hounding of the Amirault family against all reason and facts, apparently for the sole purpose of self-aggrandizement.  Unfortunately, all too frequently AG's are rewarded for prosecutorial abuse in the form of media attention and often election to higher offices (Janet Reno rode witch hunts of day care operators very similar to Coakley's into the White House).

The day care worker witch hunt was one of the more bizarre events to occur in my lifetime.  I even sat on a jury of such a case, the only jury I have ever been on.  You have heard of copycat murders?  This turned out to be a copycat false accusation.  It eventually became clear that the teenage babysitter who made the main accusations really wanted to be on the Oprah show, and saw how other day care and child abuse whistle blowers had been interviewed by Oprah.   I kid you not.   By the time of this case, defense lawyers had become wise to the prosecutors' game of using brainwashing techniques to try to get small children to make bizarre sexual allegations against adults in the case.  So the defense was able to highlight the extremes that a couple of state psychologists had gone through to effectively break one poor 6 year old girl.  It was sickening, and it took us about 15 minutes to acquit.   But this is the type of behavior Ms. Coakley and her staff were engaging in.

"Exceptional..."

 

POLL: 51% Favor Government Shutdown Until Congress Cuts Health Care Funding...


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As you may have heard, Boulder, Colorado has been hit by massive flooding over the past week, and it's been something of a mess. A local company, Falcon UAV, makers of special drones which are built for the government, approved by the FAA, and specialize in using GPS and cameras to generate highly accurate maps, started helping to map the damage with those drones. It was basically making very useful, near real-time maps showing the floods. You'd think that would be useful to, say, FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency in charge of helping to coordinate the response to the floods. Instead, FEMA ordered the drones grounded or it would have people from Falcon UAV arrested. Once again, this isn't just some guy with a toy quadcopter trying to take photos. These are drones designed for this sort of thing. As the company explains, this grounding made little sense, and possibly held back relief efforts.

Early Saturday morning Falcon UAV was heading up to Lyons to complete a damage assessment mapping flight when we received a call from our Boulder EOC point of contact who notified us that FEMA had taken over operations and our request to fly drones was not only denied but more specifically we were told by FEMA that anyone flying drones would be arrested. Not being one to bow to federal bureaucrats we still went up to Lyons to do a site survey for how we can conduct a mission in the near future to provide an adequate damage assessment to this storm ravaged community.

While we were up there we noticed that Civil Air Patrol and private aircraft were authorized to fly over the small town tucked into the base of Rockies. Unfortunately due to the high terrain around Lyons and large turn radius of manned aircraft they were flying well out of a useful visual range and didn't employ cameras or live video feed to support the recovery effort. Meanwhile we were grounded on the Lyons high school football field with two Falcons that could have mapped the entire town in less than 30 minutes with another few hours to process the data providing a near real time map of the entire town.

[...] We are very disappointed in FEMAs response to actively prevent the use of UAVs and drone technology when these services were offered for free and at a time when manned helicopters could be used for more critical missions such as evacuations and high mountain search and rescues in inaccessible communities.

Sure, you can understand why federal officials would be initially careful about what was happening, but Falcon UAV had already been working with local Boulder County officials to do this effort, and it was clear that what its drones were doing was helpful. Shutting it down with no explanation and threatening to arrest the operators just seems like FEMA shoving people around because it can.

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I am still reading through the Detroit Free Press report on Detroit's financial history and it is really amazing.  All the stuff you expect to see is there -- over taxation, over regulation, crony gifts, huge government pay and pensions, etc.  But this was new to me, and even worse than I expected:

Gifting a billion in bonuses: Pension officials handed out about $1 billion in bonuses from the city’s two pension funds to retirees and active city workers from 1985 to 2008. That money — mostly in the form of so-called 13th checks — could have shored up the funds and possibly prevented the city from filing for bankruptcy. If that money had been saved, it would have been worth more than $1.9 billion today to the city and pension funds, by one expert’s estimate.

Outright gifts of taxpayer money to government workers, even beyond their already rich salary and pensions!  Folks on the Left from Paul Krugman to Obama are trying to portray Detroit as the innocent victim of economic and demographic exogenous forces beyond their control.  Don't let them.  The exodus from Detroit and the destruction of its economy were not random events the city had to endure, but self-inflicted wounds.

… is from page 152 of the 1991 Robert Schalkenbach Foundation edition of Henry George‘s 1886 volume, Protection or Free Trade; George is here rightly ridiculing those who insist that other countries’ tariffs, subsidies, and other self-imposed mercantilist distortions on their economies justify the home-country government imposing similar distortions on the home-country economy:

And those who say that a nation should adopt a policy essentially bad because other nations have embraced it are as unwise as those who say, Lie, because others are false; Be idle, because others are lazy; Refuse knowledge, because others are ignorant.

Senate to define 'journalist'...


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Rolling Stone’s Jeff Goodell demonstrates what a biased journalist he is. My first impression was to ignore the request for interview from Rolling Stone’s Jeff Goodell last week, after all, RS has pretty much blown what credibility they had after … Continue reading →

WARNS: 'Anarchists' have taken over!


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Posting part of an old standup routine last week reminded me to be on the lookout for people developing their own comedy bits as I went through my inbox over the weekend. Sure enough, I found plenty of them. So here’s a version of From the News in which we pay homage to the funny, funny people out there.

‘Simpsons’ creator giving away his fortune to … ?

One of the co-creators of The Simpsons is giving away a lot of money:

Since word got out about Sam Simon’s cancer, this co-creator of “The Simpsons” and fervent philanthropist has heard from many people online asking to help rid him of his sizable wealth.

“Some people just want a million dollars. Or help with college tuition. And the rest have business propositions,” he chortles. “Like that should be my legacy: to lose money on your movie or your moisturizer line.

“I’m bedridden,” says Simon, milking the scenario for all its tragicomic worth, “weighing whether to dole my money to people lined up outside the house!”

He laughs, flashing a piano-keys grin. Then he gets serious.

“I’m supporting the charities that I supported during my lifetime,” he states, “and I want to continue to do that.” With every cent of his fortune.

Sam Simon has had much to think about since his advanced colon cancer was diagnosed last November after a year of inconclusive tests and mysterious discomfort.

Sam Simon sounds like a great guy and I sincerely wish he could pull off a miraculous recovery. I don’t think it’s funny that he’s dying. But this is:

In March, the headquarters of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals in Norfolk, Va., was christened the Sam Simon Center in recognition of his support for that organization. Simon’s largesse carries over to humans, too, including a Los Angeles food bank that feeds 200 families each day in Simon style: with a vegan menu.

Sam Simon has been a vegan for decades, but he’s dying of colon cancer at age 58. So naturally, he supports a vegan food bank and is giving a huge chunk of his fortune to PETA – the same people who post billboards around the country warning people that eating meat causes colon cancer.

Good joke, Sam.

McMedia McWarnings over McVeggie wraps

Speaking of PETA, did you hear the one about the vegan who ate lunch at McDonald’s? Okay, neither did I, but perhaps that will change if McDonald’s has its way:

The new Santa Fe and Mediterranean Veggie wraps from McDonald’s, prepared at the head office in Toronto for a select audience, are delicious, brimming with flavour and texture.

Nice setup. Let’s see where this is going.

Finally, something new that adults can order when picky-eater offspring insist on Chicken McNuggets and fries: the restaurant chain announced Tuesday that it’s introducing the two new meatless items to its menu Canada-wide.

You’re suggesting adults are delighted they can finally order veggie wraps instead of cheeseburgers? Good one.

But consumers need to understand what they’re eating: The Santa Fe Signature McWrap contains 490 calories, 24 grams of fat, 56 grams of carbohydrates, 980 mg of sodium, 8 grams of fibre and 15 grams of protein.

A Big Mac contains 540 calories, 29 grams of fat, 44 grams of carbohydrates, 1,020 mg of sodium, 3 grams of fibre and 24 grams of protein.

So compared to a Big Mac, the veggie wrap has less protein, less fat and more carbohydrates. And people are going to order this as the “healthier” option. Okay, that’s worth a chuckle. But I had to glance up at the headline to see the real joke:

McDonald’s new veggie wrap: Delicious but high in fat, calories

When McMedia types look at a McMeal high in refined carbohydrates and warn readers about the fat, that just cracks me up.

The first two articles were one-off jokes. I like one-off jokes, but I always admired comedians who could weave together extended routines. (Bill Cosby was a master of the extended form.) So let’s move on to the long-form comedy routine, which was developed largely by the U.S. government.

The first part isn’t funny, but it’s part of the setup, so bear with me.

More kids getting fatty liver disease

Remember when Dr. Robert Lustig said giving your kids sugary drinks is like giving them alcohol minus the buzz? That may explain this:

A type of liver disease once thought to afflict primarily adult alcoholics appears to be rampant in children. Some 1 in 10 children in the U.S., or more than 7 million, are thought to have the disease, according to recent studies.

The condition, in which the normally rust-colored organ becomes bloated and discolored by yellowish fat cells, has become so common in non-drinkers that it has been dubbed nonalcoholic fatty liver disease.

“Sir, I pulled you over because you were weaving into the oncoming lane. Are you drunk?”

“No, officer, I swear! I’m not drunk.”

“Yes we are!”

“Sir, who said that?”

“Uh … my liver.   But he’s not drunk.  He just acts like it.”

The condition’s rise is tied to the obesity epidemic—about 40% of obese children have it—but isn’t caused solely by being overweight. The disease appears to be growing among normal-weight children too, experts say.

And even though obesity rates are starting to level off, the prevalence of fatty liver disease continues to rise, they say.

It’s likely there are multiple factors that worsen fatty liver disease. Early research shows that the disease is partly genetic but likely needs to be triggered by environmental conditions, like obesity or insulin resistance. Much of the current research has focused on genes and specific nutrients in the diet that might cause the disease. One culprit is fructose, a type of sugar found in corn syrup and fruit juice, which are widely consumed in western diets, according to Dr. Vos’s research.

So adults, obese kids and even normal-weight kids are getting fatty liver disease at records rates.  Corn syrup – which is dirt-cheap because it’s subsidized by the federal government – is part of the problem. Okay, that’s the setup. Moving on …

My health-insurance premiums are going to skyrocket

This one wasn’t from an online article or an email, so there’s nothing to link to and I’ll paraphrase instead of doing my usual copy-and-paste.

Remember when the Affordable Care Act was being debated and Obama promised that if you like your current policy you can keep it and insisted that rates in the individual market won’t go up?

Man, what a comedian he is. I received a letter from my insurance carrier last week informing me that the Affordable Care Act will ban my current high-deductible plan, that I’ll be required under the law to buy a “comprehensive” plan (meaning way more coverage than I want or need), and that my rates will rise “sharply” as a result. So the Affordable Care Act will force me to buy a much less affordable policy. Joke’s on me.

(Quick joke within the larger routine: how do you know when a politician is lying? His lips are moving.)

Moving on again …

Schools dropping out of USDA’s “healthier” lunch program

Some schools apparently don’t like being part an extended comedy routine:

After just one year, some schools around the country are dropping out of the healthier new federal lunch program, complaining that so many students turned up their noses at meals packed with whole grains, fruits and vegetables that the cafeterias were losing money.

Federal officials say they don’t have exact numbers but have seen isolated reports of schools cutting ties with the $11 billion National School Lunch Program, which reimburses schools for meals served and gives them access to lower-priced food.

Districts that rejected the program say the reimbursement was not enough to offset losses from students who began avoiding the lunch line and bringing food from home or, in some cases, going hungry.

The food is so bad, schools participating in a lunch program subsidized by the federal government are losing money. You can’t write this stuff.

Kids in Kentucky were a little more colorful in their contributions to the routine:

Students in a rural Kentucky county — and their parents — are the latest to join a growing national chorus of scorn for the healthy school lunches touted by first lady Michelle Obama.

“They say it tastes like vomit,” said Harlan County Public Schools board member Myra Mosley at a contentious board meeting last week, reports The Harlan Daily Enterprise.

Not bad, kids, but here’s a lesson from a former pro: it’s funnier if you imply the gross thought instead of saying it. Next time, try something like, “I found this grey, smelly stuff on my lunch tray and thought one of the cafeteria workers must have gotten sick on it. Turns out it was the main course. Oh, and we’re not allowed to have seconds anymore. Yeah, that’s a big disappointment. Like we were all thinking, Hey, the guy flipping the veggie wraps looks like he has the flu. Maybe we’ll get dessert today.”

The growing body of USDA meal regulations implemented by the Department of Agriculture under the “Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010″ has long been a signature issue for the first lady.

Denizens of Harlan County don’t much care, though. Their primary concern at the board meeting was a bevy of complaints that local children are starving at lunch — and for the remainder of the school day — because the food on offer in the cafeteria is crappy and there isn’t nearly enough of it.

This is what comedians call a trap-door joke or a switch. The idea is to set up an expectation with words and then defeat the expectation. Politicians are brilliant at coming up with switch jokes. They pass the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act and the result is kids who are hungry despite drinking sugary milk that will help give them fatty liver disease. They pass the Affordable Care Act and the result is a spike in my premiums. Just wait until they pass something called the Citizen Privacy Act or the Debt Reduction Act. Then the laughs will be huge.

Good comedians also know how to follow a joke with a second punchline called a tag or a topper. Here’s someone from the USDA demonstrating the technique:

Dr. Janey Thornton, deputy undersecretary for USDA’s Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services, which oversees the program, said she is aware of reports of districts quitting but is still optimistic about the program’s long-term prospects.

“Many of these children have never seen or tasted some of the fruits and vegetables that are being served before, and it takes a while to adapt and learn,” she said.

Friggin’ hilarious, Dr. Thornton. Great topper. Let me toss one into the routine: I’m aware of the letter from my insurance company warning me that that Affordable Care Act will cause my premiums to increase “sharply,” but I’m still optimistic that my insurance will be more affordable in the long run. It’ll just take awhile for me to learn and adapt.

Thank you. I’ll be here all week.

So the USDA mandates low-fat, low-salt, low-calorie foods in schools and – surprise! — kids don’t like them.  Hmmm, how is the USDA going to justify subsidizing the big food producers if parents, students and local schools don’t want to buy their products? Let the routine continue …

USDA giving away free school meals regardless of need

“Why are the kids all laughing over there?”

“Some smart-ass senior is cracking jokes about how awful the new lunches are.”

“Geez … Do you think maybe they’d be interested in eating breakfast here too?”

Exactly what a government that’s almost $17 trillion in debt should do … start giving every kid two “free” meals per day:

The nation’s oldest school system has joined a program of the U.S. Department of Agriculture that has spread to 10 states and the District of Columbia that offers students two free meals every school day, whether or not their families can afford them.

Known as Community Eligibility Option, the program is part of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 that authorized $4.5 billion in new program funding.

“It’s one less weight and one less burden for parents,” said Joshua Rivera, whose son is a second-grader at the Maurice J. Tobin School in Boston’s Roxbury section.

Efrain Toledano, principal of the Tobin School, said he expects the program will cut down on potential disruptions at the K-8 school by easing hunger pangs that could be linked to classroom misbehavior.

Brilliant bit.  They’re going to ease hunger pangs by encouraging even more kids to eat the “free” meals that kids all over the country say are leaving them hungry. I wonder if we’ll get a topper for that one.

And, officials say, serving more kids actually saves them money.

Okay, it’s technically a topper, but as a comedian I’m a bit offended because it’s also a very old joke. Lyndon Johnson came up with the first version of that joke when he claimed that Great Society programs costing trillions of dollars would save money in the long run. Unfortunately, Johnson’s delivery was so dry, people didn’t know he was joking. Frustrated by his inability to get a laugh with what he considered his best punchlines, he dropped out of the presidential race in 1968. Richard Nixon won the election and went on to entertain the public with lines like “I have a secret plan to end the war” and “I am not a crook” that people at least recognized as jokes.

Among the many jokes buried in the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act is a line that goes something like this:

We don’t want kids to be fat, so we’re going to forbid schools from serving them whole milk but allow chocolate skim milk and strawberry skim milk.

The joke is that ounce for ounce, those milks have as much sugar in them as Coca-Cola Classic. The topper is the part where the USDA offers to give kids “free” meals that include sugary milk twice per day – regardless of need! – and government officials claim this will save money in the long run. You know, because it’s so cheap to treat kids for fatty liver disease.

I swear, they’ve got a million of them.

It’s quite an extended comedy routine we’ve witnessed over the years, so let’s review:

The federal government discourages people from eating natural fats and encourages them to suck down processed vegetable oils and refined carbohydrates.  To help ensure that people follow the advice, the federal government subsidizes those foods with our tax dollars to make them dirt cheap.  High fructose corn syrup ends up in almost everything people buy at the grocery store.

As a result, people get fatter and sicker.  Both kids and adults start coming down with type 2 diabetes and fatty liver disease at record levels.  The federal government responds by spending more of our tax dollars to subsidize school lunches and encourage kids to eat more of the foods that made them fat and sick.  Strangely enough, kids continue to get fatter and sicker, so the USDA doubles down and mandates even less fat in their school meals while encouraging them to drink sugar-laden fat-free milk.  When kids say they can’t stand the low-fat meals and rebel, the USDA responds by announcing it is optimistic about the long-term results and begins giving away the food twice a day for free — regardless of need!

Meanwhile, the rise in obesity, diabetes, and other conditions caused by consuming too many federally-subsidized sugars, grains and processed vegetable oils causes health-care costs and therefore health-insurance premiums to skyrocket.  Wanting to participate in the extended comedy routine, the voters demand the federal government step in and DO SOMETHING about this problem.  So the federal government passes the Affordable Care Act, which makes insurance more affordable by forcing people to drop their inexpensive high-deductible polices and buy “comprehensive” coverage they don’t want or need.  As a final topper, the agency in charge of fining people who don’t participate in the Affordable Care Act has asked for its employees to be exempt from the Affordable Care Act.

All of this will, of course, save us money in the long run.

Pure.  Comic.  Genius.

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