Over at Cold Fury, Mike is discussing the spectacle of Lois Lerner taking the 5th before Congress. He observedquoted DrewM at Ace of Spades:

What a smug SOB she is. She sat there like she’d done nothing wrong and was above it all.

That is not due to any intended deception on her part. She believes that she did nothing wrong, all the way to her core of her being.

First, as Heinlein said, no one is a villain in their own eyes. They always manage to rationalize why their immoral or unethical actions were actually just peachy if everyone knew the whole story about them.

But it goes beyond that with today’s leftists. They are steeped in post-modern philosophy, so steeped in fact that they can’t even think outside the patterns imposed by that philosophy. There are axioms that they believe cannot be violated, and that reality can never falsify.

One axiom is that leftists are wise, beneficent people who are eminently qualified to boss everyone else around by virtue of their superior intellect and good intentions. The direct corollary to this axiom is that any time they fail in the real world, the fault must be ascribed to someone not on the left.

Reality doesn’t matter here. Any non-left group will do as the scapegoat, even squishy establishment Republicans. Any excuse (non-doctored "doctored" emails, non-hacked "hacked" Twitter accounts) will do.

That leads to another axiom: anyone who opposes the left deserves whatever the left can inflict on them. Anyone opposing the left has shown by that very fact that they are morally deficient, have bad intentions, and are possibly less than human.

So it’s not wrong to discriminate against them, violate the law to deny them access to the political process, throw them in jail for non-existent or flimsy reasons (such as carrying a perfectly legal gun in the trunk of their car), tax them until their ears bleed, seize their property because someone else happened to be parked there with a joint, seize their property because they changed the course of a creek that only runs once every three years, throw them out of college for inoffensive remarks that accidentally offend another hyper-sensitive leftist, take their children away from them for indoctrination by the state, and prohibit them from doing a thousand things that used to be perfectly legal and have no demonstrated harm or ill effects.

In fact, it’s not simply that it’s not wrong to do those things. It’s virtuous to do such things to those who oppose the left. Lois Lerner can sit there and be smug in the face of Republican questions because she’s positive in her heart and soul that she was doing good to impede and harass the Tea Party organizations. It was a virtuous act, as far as she is concerned, and she does not feel the least shame or guilt over it.

It’s an inconvenience that she and the rest of the oppressive leftists who love government got caught, of course.  They have to manufacture narrative, dance around those bumbling Republicans who have to put up a show for the people back home, and, perhaps worst of all, they’ll have to suspend their oppression of their political enemies during a short cosmetic period before they get back to business.

But never, ever expect today’s left to show remorse for any act they undertake, no matter how illegal, immoral, or unethical it might be. For them, whatever behavior benefits the left is, by definition, virtuous. 

New York recently passed a law making it very difficult for people to offer short-term rentals via popular websites like Airbnb and Roomorama, which connect room-owners and room-renters. New Yorkers could be fined $25,000 if they rent to tourists through those services. This is ridiculous, argues John Stossel, because there’s no need for authoritarian governments to ban consenting adults from renting to each other.

View this article.

Your spare bedroom is not your own.

(Ilya Somin)

Last week, economist Bryan Caplan wrote an interesting post explaining why people’s virtue or lack thereof is often most evident in their unpopular views:

Consider a world where 80% of people are Conformists, 10% of people are Righteous, and 10% are Reprobates. The Conformists are epistemically and morally neutral, so they believe and support whatever is popular. The Righteous are epistemically and morally virtuous, so they believe and support whatever is true and right. The Reprobates are epistemically and morally vicious, so they believe and support the opposite of what the Righteous believe and support....

What happens? There are clearly two equilibria: one good, one bad. If the true&right is popular, then the Conformists and the Righteous have 90% of the vote, so the true&right prevails. If the true&right is unpopular, then the Conformists and Reprobates have 90% of the vote, so the false&wicked prevails.

Now suppose that in this world, you are trying to assess an individual’s virtue. In the good equilibrium, identifying the virtuous is hard. Only 1 out of 9 supporters of the status quo is genuinely virtuous. The vast majority support the true&right out of sheer convenience. Identifying the vicious, however, is easy. In the good equilibrium, all supporters of the false&wicked are vicious.

The mirror image holds in the bad equilibrium. Identifying the virtuous is easy: Everyone who supports the true&right despite their unpopularity is virtuous. Identifying the vicious, in contrast, becomes hard...

On the plausible assumption that most real-world people are basically conformists, you can’t accurately assess virtue by studying people’s views in isolation. You have to look at their unpopular views. Believing true&right things despite their unpopularity is a sign of genuine virtue. Believing false&wrong things despite their unpopularity is a sign of genuine vice.

There is a lot of truth to Bryan’s argument. For example, modern Americans deserve little credit for being opposed to slavery, because almost everyone holds that view today. By contrast, William Lloyd Garrison deserves great credit for being an antislavery activist back when it was extremely unpopular in the 1830s. I would, however, extend Bryan’s argument to separate out moral and epistemic virtue. Some people might be genuine truth-seekers willing to court unpopularity, but simply do a poor job of evaluating the truth or falsehood of particular views. Others might be very good at evaluation, but choose not to use those skills because they care more about social acceptance than truth. You could argue that the well-intentioned by epistemically incompetent person deserves greater moral credit than the one who combines the opposite set of traits.

For readers who want to evaluate me using Bryan’s test, here are some of the most unpopular views I have ever expressed here at the VC, based on their distance from those of the average voter:

1. Organ markets should be legalized.

2. Most (though not all) public sex and public nudity should be legalized.

3. Knowledgeable children should be allowed to vote.

4. The entire War on Drugs (not just the ban on marijuana and a few other relatively popular drugs) should be abolished.

5. It is unjust to decide immigration policy without giving the rights and interests of would-be immigrants at least close to the same weight as those of current residents of the United States.

Somewhat less unpopular, but still strongly counter to conventional wisdom:

6. No one has any special moral obligations to other people of the same race or ethnicity, including members of historically persecuted minority groups, (e.g. – Jews have no special moral obligations to other Jews, blacks have no special obligations to other blacks, etc.). It is possible that this position is more popular than I think it is. I haven’t seen any systematic survey data on it, and am mostly judging based on personal experience, combined with the commonality of rhetoric holding that we have obligations to “our people” and the like.

7. Nationalism is a great evil, usually causing more harm than good even in its relatively more moderate forms. The conventional wisdom, I think, is that nationalism is a generally good or at least neutral phenomenon that becomes problematic only if taken to extremes.

There are important commonalities between 1, 2, and 4 on my list, and also between 5, 6, and 7. The former stem in part from my rejection of moral arguments that draw on “the yuck factor,” at least in so far as they are used to justify making anything illegal. The latter reflect my unusually categorical rejection of moral claims based on on ties of race, ethnicity, culture, or sovereignty.

Several of the above positions are less uncommon in academia than among the general public. But most do not enjoy majority support even among academics. There are, of course, many other issues where I go against the views of the majority of academics (who are, on average, much more left-wing than I am). But most of them are cases where my view has much greater support from general public opinion than the above.

The British foreign minister William Hague blames Iran and Hezbollah for the persistence of the Assad regime.

From Reuters:

British Foreign Secretary William Hague said on Wednesday Iran and its militant Shi'ite Lebanese ally Hezbollah were "propping up" Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and giving him increasing support.

"It is very clear that Syrian regime is receiving a great deal of support, increasing support in recent months from outside Syria from Hezbollah and Iran. This is a regime that is increasingly dependent on external support," Hague said in a news conference with his Jordanian counterpart Nasser Judeh.

Hague announced earlier this year Britain was sending military aid to rebels in Syria. Syrian rebels recently blamed Russia’s support of Bashar Assad for their inability to topple the government thus far, while the State Department has accused Iran of sending soldiers to Syria to support the Assad regime.

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(Kenneth Anderson)

Just in time for President Obama’s big speech Thursday at the National Defense University on counterterrorism policy and strategy, Commentary Magazine has made available early my June cover article, “The Case for Drones.”  (Available free and not behind the subscriber wall.)  It’s a long essay arguing that drones are both effective and ethical, and addressing a number of the objections to each of those propositions.

The article has a particular audience in mind. It is aimed at conservatives and Republican members of Congress especially, to remind them that their sometimes knee-jerk attacks on the “imperial” Obama presidency risks one major piece of national security that the Obama administration has got well and truly right.  There’s no lack of imperial presidency, abuse of power material for conservatives to work with- pick your issue this week – but this particular issue is one where, if conservatives look down the road, they ought to see that any president, Republican or Democrat, will need to have available the national security tools of drone warfare and national security.  It would be a remarkably foolish thing if, by inattention or inappropriate and merely reflexive attacks on the Obama administration’s drone policy, Republicans in Congress wound up permitting drone warfare to be made politically, morally, or legally illegitimate – just as a future Republican president enters office and discovers that, yes, there are terrorist threats best addressed by drones.  Congressional Republicans, in the midst of the many abuse of power hearings, ought nonetheless to be scheduling hearings to invite current and former administration officials to reiterate their legal views on drone warfare, with the express purpose of standing with the President on this tool of national security and its permanent, legal, and legitimate place.

Commentary is a conservative magazine, obviously, and I’m writing there as a conservative for a conservative audience.  The framing above is political.  But there’s a much more neutral, less political way of framing the issue that ought equally to appeal to the broad national security center across both parties: the core elements of US counterterrorism policy, including detention policy and the whole range of what I’ve sometimes called “counterterrorism-on-offense” (including drones), needs to be put on a much firmer and more permanent basis.

Call this “institutional settlement” in counterterrorism strategy.  We need an institutional settlement around counterterrorism – we have a lot of policies that work pretty well, but they rely largely on executive branch discretion.  There are substantive reforms that need to be made in order to institutionalize counterterrorism policies, and they depend upon the two political branches coming together to give them legitimacy.  In my view there is broad agreement in the center as to these policies in substance; what they lack is a political foundation in actual legislation.  (But giving important credit, let’s note that Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-TX) has just offered legislation that would begin to address legislatively the accountability and oversight issues created by the growth of military special operations; on my first read, it looks like a very good start.)

The fault lies both with the administration and with Congress, but one way or another we today owe it to whoever is responsible for national security tomorrow to make sure that there is a stable, functional, institutionally legitimate framework going forward.  It won’t ever satisfy certain constituencies ever – a big chunk of the international community, Obama’s leftwing, or the Pauline wing of the Republican Party, which are simply at odds with the substance – but it is the pretty clear view of the broad center of both voters and this country’s leadership.  That said, precisely the fact that in the political center most everybody’s on board with the substance means that it’s hard to generate energy to give it the process, oversight, and accountability legs it needs to make its legitimacy permanent.  But institutional settlement, stability of the framework over time and administrations of different parties, matters hugely.

Certainly I hope the President’s speech tomorrow reaches out to address the needs of institutional settlement.  And I very much hope that Congress, and Congressional Republicans especially, take up the opportunity to find ways to engage legislatively – legislating as if there might be both Republicans and Democrats in the presidency.

(And thanks to John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, for getting this June article up early in advance of the President’s speech, and for making it available free to non-subscribers.  Plus, for anyone interested, at this moment it looks as though I’ll be part of a roundtable commenting on the speech on To the Point on NPR tomorrow afternoon.)

 

Government, an aggressive and complex multicellular organism, can be found in nearly every region and climate of the planet, including those such as North America where the natural habitat is often inhospitable. In order to thrive in such climates, government has evolved a variety of sophisticated survival strategies. These have enabled it to co-exist with, and often out-compete, other species. 

A full examination of these strategies falls beyond the scope of this paper, writes A. Barton Hinkle, but a brief summary should suffice to acquaint the lay reader with the more salient ones.

View this article.

Government has evolved a variety of sophisticated survival strategies.

Writing in The New York Times, James C. Goodale, one of the attorneys who represented the New York Times Co. in its legal battle with the Nixon Administration over the Pentagon Papers, says President Barack Obama is on track to “pass President Richard Nixon as the worst president ever on issues of national security and press freedom.” He writes:

The government's subpoena of The Associated Press's phone records was bad enough. But the disclosure of the search warrant in the [Fox News reporter James] Rosen case shows President Obama has delved into territory never before reached by previous presidents....

Until President Obama came into office, no one thought talking or emailing was not protected by the First Amendment. President Obama wants to criminalize the reporting of national security information. This will stop reporters from asking for information that might be classified. Leaks will stop and so will the free flow of information to the public.

Read the whole thing here.

(Ilya Somin)

This Vancouver Sun article reports that dogs are much more effective at sniffing out meat than drugs [HT: Steve Bainbridge]:

Federal search dogs at international border entry points have a penchant for sniffing out one thing more than anything else: meat.

In fact, dogs trained to find animal products turn up meat around 20 times more frequently than drug-sniffing dogs find narcotics, according to government documents obtained by Postmedia News under access-to-information legislation.

The release of the data comes as federal officials question the necessity and effectiveness of the dogs, with the Canada Border Services Agency dismantling some of its search-dog teams over the past year – a move the federal union believes will erode the ability to quickly search incoming cargo and seize drugs and firearms.

The article gives lots of explanations for this entirely unsurprising finding. But it ignores the obvious points that dogs like meat a lot more than drugs. Meat is edible while drugs (usually) are not. Thus, your average canine has evolved to be a much better meat detector than drug detector. In addition, as I discussed in this post, drug-sniffing dogs often err because their main objective is to please their human handlers rather than find the drugs as such; as a result they tend to signal “false positives” if they sense that that’s what the handler wants. By contrast, meat-sniffing dogs have reasons of their own for finding meat. The point is so glaringly obvious that this could be considered a dog-bites-man story – except that it is actually much more common for dogs to bite pieces of meat than humans.

Unfortunately, there is a more serious side to the story. Despite the fact that drug-sniffing dogs have a high error rate, government policy – and even Supreme Court decisions - are often based on the assumption that they are far more accurate than the evidence shows.

In a recent experiment by KCNC, the CBS station in Denver, three daily cannabis consumers performed poorly on a driving course after smoking pot and achieving THC blood levels ranging from more than twice to more than five times Colorado's new presumptive legal limit of five nanograms per milliliter. The results contrast with those of experiments by Denver's Fox station and by the CBS affiliate in Seattle, in which marijuana users performed competently (on a simulator and a driving course, respectively) at THC levels far above five nanograms. The differences highlight the wide interpersonal variability in marijuana's impact on driving ability, which is a good reason to be wary of any attempt to equate a particular THC level with impairment.

Unlike its sister station in Seattle, KCNC, a.k.a. CBS4, did not have a police drug recognition expert observe the subjects as they navigated the course, relying on the judgment of the driving instructor who accompanied them, supplemented by images captured by 10 cameras on and near the car. Although the instructor never had to take the wheel or use his brake, he said all three volunteers seemed impaired after smoking marijuana, which they did repeatedly. CBS4's description is rather hazy on the question of how impaired the drivers were and at which THC levels.

Lauren, a 25-year-old who "describes herself as a heavy marijuana user," arrived with a THC level of 11.2 nanograms, more than twice the legal limit, "even after refraining from smoking for 10 hours." (She had, however, consumed marijuana edibles and hash the night before.) Lauren's first smoke raised her THC level to 18.8 nanograms. Here is CBS4's description of her performance:

Early on Lauren had steering problems. Like the others, Lauren redid the course three times after smoking each time. Stolberg [the instructor] noted she had problems with speed and going beyond stop signs.

Although the impact of residual THC is a crucial issue in the debate about how to define driving under the influence of a drug (DUID), CBS4 does not say how Lauren did in her initial runs through the course, before her first puff. If she completed the course satisfactorily at that point, when her THC level was 11.2 nanograms, that would be evidence against the five-nanogram cutoff. And if she was screwing up from the very beginning, that raises the question of whether her performance got worse after she consumed cannabis or remained about the same.

Ty, a 50-year-old who "describes herself as a medium to heavy smoker," arrived with a THC level of 1.4 nanograms and hit 12.1 after her first smoke. At that point, says CBS4, she "had trouble maintaining the speed limit and hit several cones." According to the instructor, "She did worse than the first time. She's missing entire elements of the course."

Chris, a 28-year-old who "smokes a moderate amount every day for pain relief," had an initial THC level of 1.8 nanograms, which rose to 26.5 after his first smoke. At that level, says CBS4, "his performance is described as more conservative with more jerky steering, but he only hit a small number of cones." The station adds that "his speed increased as his THC levels went up throughout the tests and he struck a few more cones." Although "he thinks he is doing just fine," says the instructor, "I think he's driving like he's impaired." It's not clear at what point the instructor said that. At 26.5 nanograms, following Chris's initial smoke, or later, when his THC level climbed to nearly 40? If Chris drove OK at 26.5 nanograms, that hardly reinforces the case for assuming drivers are impaired at five.

More generally, note what this experiment did not test: whether pot smokers are unsafe drivers at or near five nanograms. Although Colorado's new DUID law presumes they are, all of the volunteers either drove OK at levels far below that or drove poorly at levels far above. One can imagine better designed, more rigorous studies with larger samples that would help settle the question of whether five nanograms or any other specific THC level makes sense as a DUID definition. The question is why Colorado's legislature did not wait for such data rather than rushing to enact an unvalidated standard.

In related news, A.P. reports that a man who "uses marijuana for religious reasons" hopes to overturn Colorado's new DUID standard through a federal lawsuit, presumably under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. His chances do not look good, since federal courts have not looked kindly on claims involving sacramental use of marijuana, and in this case there is an added public safety argument that they probably will accept at face value.

Meanwhile, Nevada legislators are considering adding a medical exception to that state's DUID law. Nevada allows medical use of cannabis yet defines DUID as driving with two or more nanograms of "marijuana" per milliliter of blood. Unlike Colorado, Nevada does not allow defendants to present evidence that they were not actually impaired. In practice, the combination of the low ceiling and the per se rule (under which conviction is automatic for people who test at or above the cutoff) means that many, if not most, regular users can never legally drive. That policy makes no sense if the aim is to protect the public from impaired drivers. Yet the fact that someone consumes cannabis for medical rather than religious or recreational purposes is irrelevant to the question of whether he can safely operate a motor vehicle (except indirectly, since medical users may be more likely to consume cannabis frequently, which can affect their ability to drive at a given THC level because they develop tolerance and learn how to adapt to marijuana's effects). If Nevada changes its DUID law (as it should), the same standard should still apply to all drivers.

[Thanks to Richard Cowan for the A.P. links.]

A victory for protectionism and local unions

(Stewart Baker)

Anger at Chinese hacking continues to build in American business and government circles.  As a result, establishment figures have begun to embrace the idea of letting private companies do more than passively defend their networks.  The latest evidence is the report of a commission headed by two Obama appointees, former US Ambassador to China (and minor GOP Presidential candidate) Jon Huntsman and former Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair. The report apparently names Chinese hacking as a major threat to intellectual property (it’s due out later today).  And according to early press reports the commission calls for an expansion of private companies’ authority to track their stolen data back to the attacker’s network:

“The commission argued that American companies “ought to be able to retrieve their electronic files or prevent the exploitation of their stolen information” by designing their computer files to self-destruct if they fall into the wrong hands. But the authors of the report also say that if the damage “continues at current levels,” the government should consider allowing American companies to counterattack — essentially taking cyberwar private.

“If counterattacks against hackers were legal, there are many techniques that companies could employ that would cause severe damage to the capability” of the Chinese or other groups committing computerized theft, the report said. But it added a qualifier: “while properly empowered law enforcement authorities are mobilized.” Many in the administration have opposed such ideas, fearing that they could lead to a cycle of escalation between the United States and other nations that could easily spin out of control.”

The commission also adopts another view first popularized here:  that attribution of attacks should be followed by retribution, and it comes up with at least one clever bit of retribution that I’d missed:  restrictions on access to US stock exchanges:

“The new report does propose specific remedies. One is to mandate that foreign companies that want to be listed on stock exchanges in the United States first pass a review by the Securities and Exchange Commission about whether they use stolen intellectual property. “They all want their shares to be traded here, so this would impose a real cost,” Mr. Blair said. Similarly, whether companies protect intellectual property would be considered by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which judges whether an investment in the United States could pose a security risk. Currently it looks only at national security implications of investments; this would add a new criterion.”

 

• Former Congressman Anthony Weiner has announced that he is running for Mayor of New York City. Weiner resigned from Congress in 2011 after it emerged he sent a photo of his crotch to a woman using twitter and then lied about his account being hacked. 

• A CBS reporter who had reported on the gun-running Fast and Furious program as well as green energy spending says that her personal and work computers have been compromised. 

• Secretary of State John Kerry is set to meet representatives from countries backing the Syrian opposition as part of his effort to secure a peace conference.

• Councilman Eric Garcetti has been elected as Mayor of Los Angeles. 

• The University of Central Florida has reinstated a professor who was suspended for making an in-class joke.  

• The friends of a man shot was recently shot and killed by an FBI agent say he knew Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev. 

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Read more on this subject: Health and Physical Fitness
Opinion Column by Frosty Wooldridge
Part 1: When you contract cancer, what you can do   In the past 10 months, nine of my friends contracted cancer in many of its various forms: kidney, stomach, breast, prostate, colorectal, bladder, Hodgkin's, liver, ovarian and skin cancers.  All of them struggle for their lives as you read this column.   Last year, my long time friend Mike discovered his kidney cancer in November and died in February.  Twenty years ago, my sister suffered from melanoma cancer, which doctors cut from her body.  Eighteen years ago, doctors cut a cancerous growth out of me.  My sister and I enjoy our lives every single day.   I don't mind telling you that cancer scared the living hell out of me and it sobered me to the daunting enormity of its presence within our society.   The American Cancer Society estimates the numbers of new cancer cases and deaths expected in the United States in the current year and compiles the most recent data on ca
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I've got a piece in The Daily Beast called "Obama's War on Journalism," which attacks the president and his administration for their concerted efforts to shut down investigative journalism in the name of "national security." And takes issue the president's support for a "media shield law" which would consolidate even more power in the government's hand:

It’s easy to understand why he would be bothered by unwanted leaks in his administration. But his problem is the press’s gain. By definition, any media shield law is predicated upon the government defining just who counts as a “journalist” and is thus worthy of protection – and who doesn’t count and is thus subject to prosecution. 

Thanks, President Obama, but we don’t need no stinking press badges, especially in an age where all sorts of decentralized reporting and unconventional news gathering come online faster than the next second-term scandal. The First Amendment is all the shield law any American needs, especially when it’s supplemented by the protections offered by the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. What we really need is a president who lives by the Constitution more than he nods to it.

Read the whole thing.

If you think the IRS is bad, just wait until the Pentagon regulates the Internet.

Former Congressman Anthony Weiner announces his candidacy for NYC mayor

Ed Meese, Ronald Reagan's attorney general, spoke for many Republicans when he called President Obama's 2012 appointment of four federal officials without Senate approval "a breathtaking violation of the separation of powers." But according to a recent federal appeals court decision, abuses like Obama's have been a bipartisan practice in recent decades, with Republicans, including Meese's former boss, more sinning than sinned against. Senior Editor Jacob Sullum explains how modern presidents have transformed a constitutional provision aimed at allowing them to fill posts when the Senate can't approve their choices into a tool for filling posts when the Senate won't approve their choices.

View this article.

The bipartisan abuse of recess appointments flouts the Constitution's checks and balances.