Once again, the FBI encourages someone to commit a terrorist attack, sets him up with the weapon, and stops him just in time, thank goodness. Just as before, we are told over and over that the crime was in no real danger of being carried out, and yet we are supposed to thank the federal government for preempting that which they promise us never came close to happening. See Larisa Alexandrovna on this latest example of the FBI instigating a phony and contrived terror plot, stopped by the FBI. She writes:

Here is the problem I have with this whole thing. Would this teen have given up after no contact was made with the second Pakistani associate, or would he have continued on his path toward Jihad in Pakistan? Would he have even considered a domestic attack on his own? The FBI opened the door to the domestic attack. The FBI stoked his interest in committing a crime. That for me contaminates the case.

Alexandrovna points out that Mohamed Osman Mohamud could have easily been arrested on other occasions, and that if indeed he was a real threat, the FBI was playing with fire by egging him on. Had he actually carried out the attack, would not have the FBI been conspirators or accessories? It would seem so.

Young people and foreigners who are unfamiliar with the conduct of public affairs in the United States sometimes have difficulty in decoding the rhetoric used to describe government actions in this country. As a public service to such political novices, I have drawn up a brief guide whose entries match a particular government action, objective, or condition with the terms commonly used to describe it in the news media and in polite conversation. Simply apply the rule: If the government does X, it is called Y.

X = extortion; Y = taxation

X = robbery; Y = taxation

X = unjust (and often pointless or destructive) compulsion of innocent persons; Y = regulation

X = kidnapping; Y = imprisonment of persons convicted of [victimless] crimes

X = torture; Y = enhanced interrogation techniques

X = imperialism; Y = global peacekeeping operations

X = spying on citizens without cause; Y = homeland security operations

X = sexually assaulting and battering airline passengers — men, women, and children alike; Y = airline security operations

X = herding, stripping, and irradiating airline passengers — men, women, and children alike; Y = airline security operations

X = accepting bribes; Y = accepting campaign contributions

X = propagandizing the general public; Y = holding official press conferences

X = indoctrination in servility and loyalty to the state; Y = public education

X = savage, pointless massacre of foreigners; Y = national defense

X = unjust enrichment of private individuals and corporations; Y = subsidies

X = beating, tasing, and shooting innocuous persons; Y = making arrests

X = debasement of the currency; Y = quantitative easing

X = fostering systemic economic booms and busts; Y = monetary policy

X = fostering systemic economic booms and busts; Y = fiscal policy

X = wasting and destroying natural resources; Y = implementing conservation policies

X = suppressing liberties on unjust and baseless grounds; Y = implementing environmental policies

X = serving the interests of the Israeli state; Y = carrying out Middle East policies

X = maintaining a police state; Y = maintaining law and order, public health, and national security

X = lying about everything of consequence; Y = keeping the public informed

X = robbing productive Peter to pay unproductive Paul; Y = maintaining the safety net

X = murderous, blundering, destructive global intervention; Y = U.S. foreign policy

X = suffering blowback; Y = being attacked because foreigners hate us for our freedoms

X = unjustly enriching Goldman Sachs et alia; Y = preventing another Great Depression

X = deferring and worsening the inevitable day of reckoning; Y = stabilizing financial and housing markets

X = rigging the game to ensure the reelection of incumbent members of Congress; Y = democracy in action

X = bribing or intimidating foreign governments to assist big multinational corporations; Y = U.S. foreign policy

X = gratifying one’s megalomania and feathering one’s nest at public expense; Y = public service

X = war; Y = peace

X = slavery; Y = freedom

X = ignorance; Y = strength

In a recent post, Ashley Thorne discusses “Lessons of a Professional Paper-Writer” . Thorne cites a fascinating Chronicle of Higher Education column entitled “The Shadow Scholar: The man who writes your students’ papers tells his story”

This is a class (inequality) issue: those with money can afford to buy entrance to careers, those without cannot advance in life unless they work hard–something not required of their affluent peers. Therefore I propose a federal program, “No Term Papers Left Behind” to close the writing gap by 2025. This means-tested program will fund ghost writing in high school and college. No child, no term paper ought to be left behind. Those who are more affluent but lack the proper skills may also be eligible if their standardized test scores fall below a certain level. Differences in intelligence and upbringing are no excuse for failing our children. We need to embrace those differences!

Statutory definition: “children” are eligible until 26 or until they complete their degree.

This vital federal program will “grow the economy” and give a hand up to the disadvantaged. With a degree in hand, they will earn (but not learn) more. With this increase in aggregate demand, they can stimulate the consumer durable sector of the economy and buy houses to soak up the inventory of unsold homes.

Privacy and confidentiality are ensured and will be protected to the utmost. The U.S. Department of Education will not tolerate revelations of plagiarism: it is nobody’s business but the student who does (or doesn’t do) the work. After all, if someone does the work, then American productivity continues to rise—to the benefit of rich and poor alike. So, those dirty rats who would undermine the American dream of college credentialism will be punished.

Meanwhile, practice safe cheating until bourgeois morality (work, thrift, excellence) fades with the introduction of these new teaching methods.It is in the interest of “social justice” and American competitiveness that we have more college graduates. Only then can we boast “We ‘r Numbyr Wun!”

Be patriotic! Cheat! Spend!

Bill Ayers is back in the news. Robert Kennedy’s son, newly on the board of the U of I Chicago, led a move denying Ayers emeritus status as a retired professor. Newsweek covered the story

Conservative Party MEP Daniel Hannan was perhaps the first major member of the European Parliament to rebel against the socialism of the European Union (EU) and its creation of the financial debacle of Europe. He has called for the disintegration of the EU and for his attempts, he has been silenced and then expelled from the EPP-ED (European People’s Party). The video of his brilliant speech (March 24, 2009) on the global financial crisis, “The devalued Prime Minister of a devalued Government,” went viral on YouTube with 2.7 million views.

Now with the financial crises in Ireland, Portugal, Spain and elsewhere in Europe, another, courageous Euro-skeptic Nigel Farage MEP has arisen to challenge the socialist European Union and call for its end, “The Euro Game is up! Who the hell do you think you are?”

Scientists are calling into question the research cited by—and commissioned by—government officials regarding the relative risks posed to travelers subjected to full body scanners’ radiation.

Independent scientists find the actual radiation exposure is 10 times TSA estimates, and argue that the health risks aren’t mathematically worth taking:

[Arizona State University, Tempe physics] Prof. Peter Rez explained to MSNBC that while the risk of getting a fatal cancer from the screening is minuscule, it’s about equal to the probability an airplane will get blown up by a terrorist. Either way, the professor argues, dead is dead.

“There is not a case to be made for deploying [the scanners] to prevent such a low probability event,” Rez says.

Meanwhile a group of scientists at the University of California, San Francisco, have sent a letter to Obama’s Science Czar John Holdren:

…to call your attention to our concerns about the potential serious health risks of the recently adopted whole body back scatter X-ray airport security scanners. This is an urgent situation as these X-ray scanners are rapidly being implemented. [emphasis added]

The scientists further detail their concerns for the health of:

• Older travelers > 65
• The female population especially sensitive to mutagenesis-provoking radiation leading to breast cancer.
• HIV and cancer patients
• Children and adolescents
• Pregnant women
• All men:

Because of the proximity of the testicles to skin, this tissue is at risk for sperm mutagenesis.

The scientists further warn:

…given the recent [underwear bomber incident], how do we know whether the manufacturer or TSA, seeking higher resolution, will scan the groin area more slowly leading to a much higher total dose?

In addition, the scientists believe white blood cells are at risk, and ask Dr. Holdren if the effects of the radiation on the cornea and thymus have been determined.

The scientists continue:

As longstanding UCSF scientists and physicians, we have witnessed critical errors in decisions that have seriously affected the health of thousands of people in the United States. These unfortunate errors were made because of the failure to recognize potential adverse outcomes of decisions made at the federal level. Crises create a sense of urgency that frequently leads to hasty decisions where unintended consequences are not recognized. Examples include the failure of the CDC to recognize the risk of blood transfusions in the early stages of the AIDS epidemic, approval of drugs and devices by the FDA without sufficient review, and improper standards set by the EPA, to name a few. Similarly, there has not been sufficient review of the intermediate and long-term effects of radiation exposure associated with airport scanners. There is good reason to believe that these scanners will increase the risk of cancer to children and other vulnerable populations. We are unanimous in believing that the potential health consequences need to be rigorously studied before these scanners are adopted. Modifications that reduce radiation exposure need to be explored as soon as possible.

And the scientists rightly point out that the technology is highly susceptible to being made even more risky by its human operators. In addition to the warning to men, above:

Because this device can scan a human in a few seconds, the X-ray beam is very intense. Any glitch in power at any point in the hardware (or more importantly in software) that stops the device could cause an intense radiation dose to a single spot on the skin. Who will oversee problems with overall dose after repair or software problems?

The TSA is already complaining about resolution limitations; who will keep the manufacturers and/or TSA from just raising the dose, an easy way to improve signal-to-noise and get higher resolution?

Who, indeed?

Al Gore says ”It is not a good policy to have these massive subsidies for first generation ethanol,” and that he originally advocated them because he was running for president and wanted the support of Tennessee farmers.  This article gives more details.

Tax credits for ethanol are up for renewal December 31, and Gore now opposes them… and admits he only supported them originally to try to buy political support from farmers.  My guess is the farm lobby has more political clout than the world’s most visible environmentalist, and the tax credits will be renewed.

Americans who followed George W. Bush’s fractured reasoning in supporting a preemptive invasion of Iraq—a country that hadn’t actually aggressed against the U.S., but he just “knew” was going to—in the process implicitly supported the deprivation of the right to life for an estimated 122,000 Iraq civilians—on top of the up to 1.5 million (mostly children) estimated to have died as a result of the previous decade’s economic sanctions—not to mention cutting off any opportunity for the remainder of Iraq’s population to exercise its right to the pursuit of happiness.

The preemptive war has been accompanied by countless other preemptive rights violations—from warrantless wiretapping to rendition of suspects without trial. But of course the majority of Americans felt no personal threat from wiretapping or rendition, and most movies portraying the horrors and injustices of the War on Terror have been box office flops.

Suddenly, the preemptive deprivation of the rights of the presumption of innocence, security in one’s person, and against unreasonable searches has hit Americans now subjected to the lose-lose proposition of providing real-time images of one’s nude body to bureaucratic clerks demonstrated to lack discretion (see, for example, here and here), and with no reasonable assurance the image won’t be shared or leaked; or to allow one’s most intimate body parts to be groped by these same clerks.

It is sincerely to be hoped that the current show of outrage against the body scans/aggressive pat-downs will continue to grow, and force the draw-down of these intrusive techniques. But a better hope would be that the American populace—the beneficiaries of the greatest protections of rights and privileges in the history of mankind—would use this bare-faced exposure to what unchecked power reaps to reassess its tolerance to tyrannies small and great.

As noted by Mario Vargas Llosa, whose keen insights and masterful portrayals of political oppression and the abuse of power (among other themes) have garnered him the 2010 Nobel Laureate in Literature, tyrants are made, not born—and made possible only with “the complicity of the people,” and by “the abdication of the right to resist:”

Humans must resist (tyranny), especially at the beginning. Later it is harder to resist once the system is in place. But it is always possible.

Time will soon tell if Americans have been marched as far down the road to tyranny as we will be complicit with. If so, let’s this time remember and reaffirm allegiance to the understanding that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

All men—not just we who happened to be born in the United States.

A Buttonwood column in the new issue of The Economist, “Taking von Mises to pieces: Why is the Austrian explanation for the crisis so little discussed?,” discusses the enormous relevance of the Austrian School of economics, including the work of F.A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Lawrence White in explaining the current economic crisis. The long-standing dominance within the economics profession of the ideas of John Maynard Keynes has led to policies that have produced credit booms and collapses, capital misallocation, high unemployment, de-stablized markets, and widespread economic harm.

We would add that the pioneering work of Independent Institute Senior Fellow Robert Higgs, including his book Depression, War, and Cold War: Challenging the Myths of Conflict and Prosperity, has produced an entire new appreciation for the insights of the Austrians on how the New Deal prolonged and deepened the Great Depression, preventing its end until after World war II when such policies were largely eliminated, and that government interventionism since has produced repeated economic problems. The current recession is perhaps the most dramatic example.

As the article states:

John Maynard Keynes is back. The British economist has modern intellectual champions in Paul Krugman and Robert Skidelsky. For all today’s talk of austerity, a policy of Keynesian fiscal stimulus was adopted by most governments in the immediate aftermath of the credit crisis.

In contrast policymakers seem to show a lot less interest in the economic ideas of the “Austrian school” led by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, who once battled Keynes for intellectual supremacy. Yet the more you think about recent events, the odder that neglect seems.

A one-paragraph explanation of the Austrian theory of business cycles would run as follows. Interest rates are held at too low a level, creating a credit boom. Low financing costs persuade entrepreneurs to fund too many projects. Capital is misallocated into wasteful areas. When the bust comes the economy is stuck with the burden of excess capacity, which then takes years to clear up.

Take that analysis piece by piece. Were interest rates held too low? The case seems self-evident for Ireland and Spain, where the European Central Bank was setting a one-size-fits-all monetary policy. Many people would also argue that the Federal Reserve kept rates too low. Some lay the housing boom of 2003-06 at the Fed’s door, others criticise the central bank’s tendency to slash rates whenever the financial markets wobbled.

Was capital misallocated? Again most people would accept that too many houses and apartments were built in Ireland and Spain, as well as individual American states like Florida and Nevada. In some places these dwellings may sit idle for a while, keeping downward pressure on property prices. . . .

Here is the article in full.

Florida Representative John Mica sent letters to 100 airports suggesting they replace TSA screeners with private security guards, which they are already allowed to do, according to this article.  I’m in favor.  It wouldn’t eliminate the screenings, which are still required by law, but you might have friendlier service if screeners thought that customer complaints could put their jobs on the line.

Indeed, Mica’s call might make current TSA employees think more this way.

I always like to complain about government, but last week I flew out of Greenville, South Carolina, and the TSA people were actually friendly and courteous.  Even though I still had to take off my jacket and put my shoes on the conveyor belt, the smiling and friendly TSA people didn’t make screening seem like as much of an ordeal as it normally is.  (It also helped that there was no line.)  They had the old fashioned metal detectors to walk through, not the virtual strip search machines, and nobody was getting groped or patted down.  Still, our plane didn’t blow up.

For most people, that type of screening is more than enough to eliminate threats, and for the TSA, that type of screening would eliminate the backlash the TSA is currently facing.  My not-so-unpleasant experience in Greenville notwithstanding, I’m one of those travelers who’s disgruntled about TSA screenings.

Regrettably, relatively friendly screenings from relatively courteous personnel like I had in Greenville are on their way out, to be replaced by what I view, following the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, as  unreasonable searches without probable cause.  I’d even argue my Greenville screening was unconstitutional, but it appears TSA wants to push us to see just how much government intrusion we will tolerate.  With their strip search machines and full body pat-downs, they may have found the limit.