HIT & RUN BLOG

"Alice in Wonderland," Disney PicturesWhen a draft version of the encryption-busting bill written by Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Richard Burr (R-N.C.) was leaked last week, the response was a deafening clamor of ringing criticism for how simple-minded, technically ignorant, and dangerously reckless it was. The legislation responded to the struggles by law enforcement and investigators to access encrypted tech devices and communications by simply ordering tech companies to comply with court orders to decrypt and provide them the information. The end.

There was bafflingly no engagement in any of the concerns that such measures would weaken and threaten the security of all of our data. There was no interest in the possibility that some types of encryption could make it actually impossible to comply with the court order at all. All it cared about was giving the government access to data on demand. It's probably one of the most tech-illiterate pieces of legislation ever crafted.

That was the leaked draft. Today, after all that outrage and backlash, Feinstein and Burr released an actual formal draft of the law. Did they consider any of overwhelmingly critical reaction to the leaked version?

Nope. It still contains the obstinate, absurd "THE RED QUEEN DEMANDS!" language. What has been added to the draft bill are limits to the types of crimes for which the law may apply. But even those limits are written very broadly, covering any crimes that lead to (or threaten to lead to) death or serious bodily harm, espionage and terrorism, crimes against minors, serious violent felonies, and serious drug crimes—and the state-level equivalent of such crimes.

So nothing of substance has changed and they're still pushing forward with this law with the tiresome "nobody is above the law" argument that fails to actually consider whether the law remotely makes sense. Via NBC:

"No entity or individual is above the law," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, who co-authored the bill with fellow Senate Intelligence Committee member Sen. Richard Burr, R-North Carolina. "Today, terrorists and criminals are increasingly using encryption to foil law enforcement efforts, even in the face of a court order. We need strong encryption to protect personal data, but we also need to know when terrorists are plotting to kill Americans."

If the Congress passed a law requiring all Americans to be able to run a four-minute mile upon orders of the court, would those couch potatoes who couldn't do so be described as being "above the law"? Off with their heads!

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) spoke out against the law, saying it would make us all "more vulnerable to stalkers, identity thieves, foreign hackers and criminals." He said that if the bill actually makes it to the Senate floor, he would filibuster it.

In slightly better tech privacy news, the Email Privacy Act passed unanimously out of the House Judiciary Committee. This legislation would close a loophole that permits law enforcement officials to read your old stored emails or digital communications that are more than 180 days old without having to get a warrant (instead requiring just a subpoena). It still, nevertheless, has a long way to go, despite having a huge number of House co-sponsors. And keep in mind this is just the House. Given how a couple of powerful senators view your right to tech privacy and how they feel the government should be able to access your data with a simple demand, it may have a fight ahead.

Tune into Kennedy tonight at 8p ET (re-airs at 11p ET)Fox Business Network on the Fox Business Network (FBN) where I'll be joined by FBN's resident Southern foul-mouthed dynamo Dagen McDowell and ex-CIA guy Mike Baker on the party panel.

Scheduled topics include the spat between Republican National Committee chair Reince Priebus and Donald Trump, as well as the possibility of NBA players being covered in advertising.

The pièce de résistance, however, will be the epic panel discussion on which comedians are the real heroes we need to fight ISIS.

Tune in and leave comments about my tie!

Screenshot via CBS BaltimoreA Maryland high school student who obeyed the parameters of the assignment he was given is now facing widespread outrage because it wasn't politically correct—even though the point of the assignment was to write something inflammatory. 

Here's a modest proposal: in order to protect students' rights and encourage their imaginations, let's murder all teachers and administrators. Of course, no one actually advocates such a policy (not even me—keep it civil, commenters). It's an idea inspired by satirist Jonathan Swift's famous 18th century essay, "A Modest Proposal," in which he jokingly suggested that poor Irish folk should sell their children to be eaten. 

Recently, North County High School assigned students to write essays that pay homage to Swift. That seems like an inventive way to stimulate kids' creative energies while teaching them about the important literary concept of satire. 

Of course, one student who actually followed through on the assignment is now an object of public scorn because his Swiftian essay suggested that black people should be deported to the Sahara Desert in order to solve U.S. racism. 

This seems perfectly in keeping with the spirit of Swift, who, lest we forget, proposed the murder of children in his famous piece of satire. But other students complained, and the school district had this to say: 

“The student chose a subject matter that was clearly insensitive and struck a nerve with students here and staff members here. And so, they have been meetings today where the staff has tried to allow students to express their opinions and say why they’re hurt, why they’re angered,” said Bob Mosier, Anne Arundel County Schools. 

Meanwhile, the school itself dodged criticisms along the lines of this is exactly what Swift did by noting that the famous essayist could also be credibly accused of "insensitivity": 

In a letter sent home to parents, North County Principal Julie Cares said: “Just as one could argue that the content of [the original] piece was ill-advised and insensitive, such is the case with the content of the student’s piece.” 

The student wasn't publicly identified, and it doesn't appear that he will be punished. But school authority figures should have done more than decline to punish him: they should have been on his side. The course of action they took instead—coddling the offended and making apologies to parents—suggests the school wasn't really prepared to educate anyone about satire in the first place. 

Duncan/FlickrThe U.K. Department for Culture, Media & Sport is concerned about the prevalence of anal sex in online pornography. In a report on age-verification rules for British porn websites, the department frets that anal sex is not sufficiently pleasurable for women and wonders whether porn may be pressuring the poor dears into it.

In a section on "normalisation of behaviours depicted in porn," the report states: "There is also a question about the effect of pornography on 'unwanted sex'—for instance more young people are engaging in anal intercourse than ever before despite research which suggests that it is often not seen as a pleasurable activity for young women."

"While the increase in anal sex cannot be attributed directly to pornography consumption," the report continues, anal sex "does feature in a large percentage of mainstream pornography (for example, one content analysis found it featured in 56% of sex scenes)."

That study, however, had nothing to do with online pornography. In the 2010 analysis, researchers looked at the content of rented VHS & DVD porn titles between 2004-2005. Films with what was deemed "idiosyncratic content," including "gang bang" and "virtual sex" scenes, were excluded. Furthermore, the paper used to assert that women don't like anal sex did, indeed, find that anal sex was reported as "painful, risky and coercive" for women. But it also stated that "evidence about the influence of pornography on anal practices is thin," as Jane Fae points out in Gay Star News.

Fae isn't pacified by the fact that no anti-anal edicts have yet been discussed by lawmakers. "Those of us who are old hands at the lobbying game are all too aware that [reports like these] are rarely the open-ended exercises in free-wheeling empirical inquiry that Ministers and civil servants pretend they are," writes Fae. 

Britons were invited to comment on the report over a two-month period that ended this week. 

Fae suggests that many of the problems identified in the report could be remedied by better sex education and more openness with regard to anal sex, but speculates that will happen instead is some kind of ban on anal sex in porn. If that sounds far-fetched, consider that the U.K. censors have already banned porn that features spanking, female ejactulation, and another of other specific sex acts. 

• About CNN40,000 Verizon workers went on strike today over concerns like "corporate greed" and being asked to move to different states as Verizon's customer needs change. Bernie Sanders joined a rally of striking workers in Brooklyn, claiming Verizon was trying to "destroy the lives of working Americans" it employs in well-paying union jobs, while Hillary Clinton demanded Verizon return to the negotiating table.
• Donald Trump complains the the political system is "stacked" against him.
• The Southern Poverty Law Center claims the Donald Trump campaign has contributed to an "alarming level of fear and anxiety" among children of color and emboldened bullies.
• John Kasich met with Talmudic students at a Jewish bookstore in New York City and explained the Bible to them.
• The revisionism over the 1994 crime bill continues: apparently members of the Congressional Black Caucus who voted for the measure did so out of concern that a future bill might be even worse.
• Salmon caught in the waters near Seattle have some of the highest levels of cocaine and antidepressants found in American fish.

Credit: Gage Skidmore / Foter.com / CC BY-SAThe headlines are almost too good to be true. "The Time Ted Cruz Defended a Ban on Dildos," says Mother Jones. "Ted Cruz Once Fought to Keep Dildos Illegal in Texas," says Vice. But the facts are real. In 2007 Ted Cruz was the solicitor general of Texas and that year his office urged the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit to reject a constitutional challenge to the state's ban on the sale and distribution of sex toys that had been filed by some businesses that hoped to legally sell and distribute such items in the Lone Star State. "There is no substantive-due-process right to stimulate one's genitals for non-medical purposes unrelated to procreation or outside of an interpersonal relationship," the Cruz team argued. The 5th Circuit disagreed and struck down the sex toy ban.

This is all fun stuff and will no doubt lead to some very clever jokes on The Daily Show. But there were also some very serious legal questions at stake. Namely, what limits does the U.S. Constitution place on the legislative power of state governments, and what role do federal judges play in enforcing those limits? Related to that, what sort of unenumerated rights (if any) are protected from state infringement by the 14th Amendment?

Cruz's argument in this case will be instantly familiar to every student of constitutional law, and it goes like this: The 14th Amendment is not a limitless fount of unwritten rights and it is not a blank check authorizing federal judges to overturn every state law they happen to find obnoxious or outdated. The states have always enjoyed broad authority to regulate in the name of health, safety, and public morals (so the argument goes) and the sex toy ban falls squarely within the scope of that longstanding state police power. If the people of Texas don't like the law, they should take their complaint to the ballot box, not to the federal courthouse.

Now here's the argument on the other side. The police power of the states is not unlimited and unless the legislation at issue serves a legitimate public health or safety purpose, the law should not be allowed to stand when properly challenged in federal court. What's more (this argument goes), the 14th Amendment does protect certain unenumerated rights, and among those rights is the right to privacy, as the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized. Constitutional rights (including the right of consenting adults to buy and sell sex toys) cannot be left to the mercy of democratic majorities.

Perhaps this clash of legal philosophies is now starting to sound familiar. The battle over the scope of state regulatory power and the closely related battled over the reach of the 14th Amendment have been at the heart of some of the biggest and most important constitutional cases in American history, from the conflict over state regulation of the economy (Lochner v. New York) to the clash over state bans on the sale of birth control devices (Griswold v. Connecticut) and state bans on abortion (Roe v. Wade), "homosexual conduct" (Lawrence v. Texas), and gay marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges). Every one of those disputes followed the same basic pattern as the sex toy case starring Ted Cruz. The common denominator in all of the above is that a state government claimed it had the lawful authority to prohibit certain activity and the regulated/criminalized parties claimed that the prohibition violated their unenumerated rights under the 14h Amendment.

Given Ted Cruz’s record as an advocate of conservative judicial deference and his cramped reading of the 14th Amendment (not to mention his error-strewn attacks on Lochner), his position on sex toys comes as little surprise.

DreamstimeExperts worry that overprotective parenting has its own drawbacks: it creates kids who can't handle failure, being alone, or making friends. But what if it also has something to do with the phenomenon of hyper-offended college students?  

My colleague Lenore Skenazy and I have previously expressed concerns that helicoptered kids turn into helpless teenagers. When college students demand protection from everything that bothers them, they are in a sense demanding a continuation of the coddling so many of them have received throughout their entire lives. 

Dr. Abilash Gopal, a psychiatrist and author, agrees. In a terrific article for The Huffington Post, he writes: 

Overparenting is widely recognized as a problematic approach to raising kids. For nearly a decade, studies have shown how the rise of the “helicopter parent” has been worsening children’s anxiety and school performance in the K-12 years. Now we’re witnessing what happens when the overparented child grows up, and it’s a trainwreck that is painful to watch, but impossible to ignore. … 

It seems likely that many of the students at elite and liberal colleges who are complaining about the ways in which the world is keeping them down were once children raised by helicopter parents. The coddled child becomes the entitled teenager. The teen who expects his parents to fix his problems becomes the college student who demands that professors and administrators remove his obstacles. 

If we continue to walk on eggshells to avoid offending these hypersensitive young adults, we are empowering their victimhood status. If we continue to indulge their irrational demands, we are robbing them of the opportunity to learn how to function independently in the real world. If we continue to overparent our kids, we are in danger of raising further generations of adolescents that are missing three key virtues of character: self-reliance, self-confidence, and resilience. 

Gopal isn't just theorizing: he's handled cases where kids used their perceived victimhood status as a crutch, thwarting healthy emotional growth. 

His article echoes the claims made by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt in their groundbreaking piece for The Atlantic, "The Coddling of the American Mind." We do young people no favors when our efforts to shield them from reality leave them incapable of coping with it. 

Around the country, more and more people are dabbling with socialism: #drunkensocialism. The trend involves bars and restaurants selling bottles of expensive or rare alcohol one ounce at a time, at cost. It gives patrons a taste of something exotic they could never normally afford, and drives business in the process.

While it seems like a win-win scenario for all involved, the restrictive alcohol laws in Virginia make this new trend essentially illegal. 

Watch above or click the link below for full text, downloadable versions, links, and more. 

FITBGThe BMJ (fomerly the British Medical Journal) is publishing a terrfic new study that mines 40-year old data about the effects of eating saturated fats on mortality and heart disease rates. The research was a double blinded, parallel group, randomized controlled dietary intervention trial done in Minnesota in the late 1960s and early 1970s in which 9,000 participants were fed either diets that contained saturated fats (meat, milk, cheese) or diets with polyunsaturated fats (corn oil chiefly). The participants were more than 9,000 men and women over age 20 admitted to either a nursing home or  one of six state mental hospitals in Minnesota. The experiment lasted from 41 to 56 months. The researchers were seeking to find out what effects a diet low un saturated fats would have on cholesterol levels, heart disease, and overall mortality.

Eating plant-based oils did reduce cholesterol levels in participants assigned to that diet. While original researchers back in the 1970s did not find any effect on heart disease trends, they believed that had their experiment gone on that the benefits from lowering cholesterol would have eventually emerged. The results of the study were never fully published, although the researchers reported some of their preliminary results at a American Heart Association conference 1975.

So why were the results of a such rigorous study not published widely? The BMJ study also cites biostatistician Steven Broste, who used the Minnesota data in his master's thesis back in 1981, which found no significant difference in mortality rates in the saturated fats versus unsaturated fats cohorts. According to the Washington Post, Broste suggests ...

...that at least part of the reason for the incomplete publication of the data might have been human nature. The Minnesota investigators had a theory that they believed in — that reducing blood cholesterol would make people healthier. Indeed, the idea was widespread and would soon be adopted by the federal government in the first dietary recommendations. So when the data they collected from the mental patients conflicted with this theory, the scientists may have been reluctant to believe what their experiment had turned up.

“The results flew in the face of what people believed at the time,” said Broste. “Everyone thought cholesterol was the culprit. This theory was so widely held and so firmly believed — and then it wasn’t borne out by the data. The question then became: Was it a bad theory? Or was it bad data? ... My perception was they were hung up trying to understand the results.”

The BMJ data recovery and reanalysis now finds that the vegetable oil diet did lower cholesterol, but did not lower mortality or heart disease rates. In fact, for participants over age 65, lower cholesterol led to higher, rather than lower risks of death. In addition, the BMJ researchers comprehensively reviewed other controlled trials and report that they "do not provide support for the traditional diet heart hypothesis."

The BMJ study is another in a growing line of research* that undermines the "heart-healthy" dietary guidelines from the federal government and that American Heart Association. The AHA still warns:

Screenshot via MicThe activist coalition to reduce campus sexual assault—which includes celebrities, members of Congress, and even the Obama White House—has always expected the public to endorse a weird contradiction: college rape is a pervasive epidemic that touches a quarter or more of all female students, they say, but at the same time, it isn't serious enough to merit the application of stronger corrective measures. 

By "stronger corrective measures," I mean the outright abolition of dormitories, or reinstatement of single-sex facilities, or other things along those lines. 

If that sounds crazy, consider what society would demand of a factory that allowed more than 20 percent of its workers to be maimed, or an automobile manufacturer that installed faulty breaks in a quarter of its vehicles. We needn't even extend the analogy this far: if a hospital allowed a significant number of its patients to be raped, would there not be calls to shut down the hospital? 

To be clear: I don't favor closing colleges, but only because I don't buy the activists' claim that campus sexual assault is an epidemic. The question, then, is why do activists support marginal solutions—affirmative consent, bystander intervention, one-sided sexual misconduct hearings—to a problem they consistently describe as a pervasive culture of violent crime?

Vice President Joe Biden's recent interview with Mic's Antonia Hylton is a perfect illustration of this contradiction. In the interview, Biden defended the work he has done to reduce campus sexual assault, including championing the "It's On Us" bystander intervention campaign, and the Education Department's push to punish rape under the Title IX anti-harassment statute. But he also accepted the validity of scare statistics that, if accurate, would suggest the need for more direct intervention: 

Mic: Well, but let's take Harvard for example, where I went to school. Forty seven percent of the women in my graduating class who interacted with single-sex social organizations reported, by the time that they graduated, they had been sexually assaulted. Do you think that that indicates a specific and localized crisis? 

JB: Well, I think it indicates that there's a real problem at Harvard, and it's the responsibility of the president of Harvard University and the administration to go in and investigate it and if it's occurring and they can show that, get rid of the — get rid of those fraternities on campus that are engaged in it. 

But "getting rid of those fraternities" wouldn't be nearly enough. The same survey that Hylton is citing put the overall, not-just-limited-to-fraternities number at 31 percent, and determined that the overwhelmingly most common place for women to be assaulted was campus dormitories. 

Note that I'm using the word "assaulted" here because that's how Hylton phrased the statistic. But the actual survey did not find that 47 percent of some women and 31 percent of all graduating Harvard women had been sexually assaulted. Rather, it found that these women had been victims of "nonconsensual sexual contact." This seems like a meaningful difference, since "nonconsensual sexual contact" strikes me as a much broader category of behavior. Imagine, for instance, a male student brushing up against a female student at a party, or attempting to grind on her without asking first (keep in mind that under an affirmative consent standard, all contact is nonconsensual without specific prior agreement). The female student might describe this act as nonconsensual sexual contact—and she would be justified in doing so—even though her experience doesn't really rise to the level of sexual assault. 

Nonconsensual touching is a problem, too. But an epidemic of teenagers not keeping their hands to themselves is not remotely the same thing as an epidemic of rape. 

Unfortunately, this blurring of the lines that distinguish problematic behavior on campuses from criminal assault might become the most lasting legacy of the Biden-era anti-rape coalition. Thanks to federal guidance as relentlessly confusing as it is illiberal, universities are now policing harassment, nonconsensual touching, and forcible rape as if these behaviors are equally prevalent and similarly concerning. But the Title IX approach is simply ill-matched for the least and most serious of these offenses: rape should be handled by the police, and allegations of subjective harassment ought not to be policed at all. 

Ironically, the problematic conduct falling in the middle—objective harassment, nonconsensual touching—might actually be best handled by the sorts of strategies some activists recommend: awareness campaigns, education about consent norms, alcohol abuse counselling, etc. But exaggerating the extent of the crisis—asserting that one in four women are victims, not just of unpleasant behavior, but of sexual assault—has made it much more difficult to meaningfully address it. 

[Related: Five Years After the Feds Escalated the Title IX Inquisition, Are Students Ready to Sue?]

It can be difficult to get a handle on the sheer scale and scope of inefficiency and mismanagement in government, but a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) offers some assistance.

The government watchdog agency’s 2016 report on government efficiency and effectiveness found 37 different areas of government that could be run more efficiently, noted a dozen instances of “fragmentation, overlap, or duplication,” and identified 92 different actions that the government could pursue to save money and perform more effectively. The report demonstrates both why it is so easy to ignore these issues, and also why it is important to do so. 

One of the things the report makes clear is that these problems affect basically all aspects of government. The areas for potential cost savings or improvement run the gamut from health care to defense to infrastructure, loan programs, international affairs and government IT systems.

Very little of it is particularly exciting when looked at granularly, unless you’re the sort of person who thrills to discussions of National Park Service fees and improving the definition of “geographic area” in legislation related to “cargo preference for food aid.” One of the reasons bureaucracy can be so wasteful in so many ways is that, in all honesty, a lot of the little details are pretty boring. Establishing “better controls on mobile device spending”—basically, paying less for the federal government’s smartphones—would result in “substantial government-wide savings,” the GAO report notes.

But who wants that to be their big cause, their passion project? Just about no one, that’s who.

Yet because those sorts of causes are so rarely taken up with any vigor, they are allowed to linger, and eventually they start to add up into a larger problem.

Turns out people who believe they have Flynt/Dreamstime.com"nothing to hide" hold back more than anyone else when it comes to expressing "minority" opinions on social media. 

A study published in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, titled "Under Surveillance: Examining Facebook's Spiral of Silence Effects in the Wake of NSA Monitoring" theorizes, "knowing one is subject to surveillance and accepting such surveillance as necessary act as moderating agents in the relationship between one’s perceived climate of opinion and willingness to voice opinions online."

Put more succinctly, even though most Americans have some working knowledge of the revelations laid bare in 2013 by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden of the agency's mass surveillance of the population, and even though a majority of Americans deem such generalized snooping "unacceptable," the mere knowledge that online communications are "subject to government interception" influences "conformist behavior."

Motherboard summarized the study's methodology:

The paper is based on responses to an online questionnaire from a random sample of 255 people, selected to mimic basic demographic distributions across the US population.

Participants were asked to answer questions relating to media use, political attitudes, and personality traits. Different subsets of the sample were exposed to different messaging on US government surveillance to test their responses to the same fictional Facebook post about the US decision to continue airstrikes against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

They were then asked about their willingness to express their opinions about this publicly—including how they would respond on Facebook to the post; how strongly they personally supported or opposed continued airstrikes; their perceptions of the views of other Americans; and whether they supported or opposed online surveillance.

The results indicated that people who perceived their own opinions to be in the minority were less likely to comment, but so were people who felt their opinions were in the majority yet believed that government surveillance of their online activity was necessary.

The study's author, Elizabeth Stoycheff of Wayne State University told the Washington Post:

“The fact that the 'nothing to hide' individuals experience a significant chilling effect speaks to how online privacy is much bigger than the mere lawfulness of one's actions. It's about a fundamental human right to have control over one's self-presentation and image, in private, and now, in search histories and metadata,” she said.

Stoycheff is also concerned about the quietly oppressive behavior of self-censorship.

“It concerns me that surveillance seems to be enabling a culture of self-censorship because it further disenfranchises minority groups. And it is difficult to protect and extend the rights of these vulnerable populations when their voices aren't part of the discussion. Democracy thrives on a diversity of ideas, and self-censorship starves it,” she said. “Shifting this discussion so Americans understand that civil liberties are just as fundamental to the country's long-term well-being as thwarting very rare terrorist attacks is a necessary move.”

Writing at The Atlantic, Kaveh Waddel notes that "a simple reminder of everyday surveillance" can also affect people's behavior in non-digital life:

Studies have shown that being watched can make people less likely to commit some crimes, or to act in ways that don’t conform to widely held morals.

One 2013 study, for example, found that when restaurants installed monitoring software to alert managers about stealing employees, weekly revenue went up, suggesting that employees were changing their behavior in response to the knowledge that they were being watched.

But commenting on controversial topics isn't the same as skimming off your employer's bottom line. The "self-censorship" caused by the spectre of Big Brother watching our 0s and 1s isn't likely to do much besides make people's personally-curated echo chambers even more homogeneous. As Stoycheff said, government surveillance "changes the assumption that we’ve been working on this whole time, that the Internet is a safe space for deliberation."

If the people who feel they have "nothing to hide" decide to pre-emptively hide their ideas and opinions, then the robust exchange of ideas through which we all have something to potentially learn from one another is threatened.

Watch Reason TV's interview with Edward Snowden below.

NBC News screen capIrish singer Bono addressed a Senate subcommittee inquiring into the "causes and consequences of violent extremism and the role of foreign assistance."

When the conversation turned to how best to combat rising Islamic terrorism, Bono called sending in the shock-comedy troops. Cereally:

I think comedy should be deployed...The first people that Adolf Hitler threw out of Germany were the dadaists and surrealists. It's like, you speak violence, you speak their language. But you laugh at them when they are goose-stepping down the street and it takes away their power. So I am suggesting that the Senate send in Amy Schumer and Chris Rock and Sacha Baron Cohen, thank you.

You ask a general how to beat ISIS, he's gonna tell you to send in bombs and troops. You ask a diplomat the same question, she'll you to use diplomacy. You ask a carpenter how to beat ISIS, he's gonna tell you to use a hammer. So it shouldn't be surprising that a showbiz guy like Bono tells you to send in the clowns. Which, to be fair, is better than sending in high-art types or classical musicians. As I've noted elsewhere, people have named revolutions after rock bands but no one ever named one after Van Cliburn.

Let's give Bono some artistic license here when he suggests that artists (not comedians, by the way) were the first victims of the Nazi government (sadly, many groups can claim that sickening prize). Still, the idea that "going pffft in Der Fuhrer's face" was a major front in the war against Nazi aggression is a bridge too far. Anyone who seriously thinks that The Little Dictator or Bugs Bunny cartoons—as opposed to massive amounts of bombs, troops, tanks, bullets, and the like—turned the tide should have his head examined.

Which isn't to say that Bono didn't say some things worth considering. In the past, he's noted (with sadness!) that increasing global trade has done more to alleviate extreme poverty than aid and in his comments yesterday, he said:

'When aid is structured properly, with a focus on fighting poverty and improving governance, it could just be the best bulwark we have against the extremism of our age,' the rock star and anti-poverty campaigner testified.

But should U.S. leaders heed his call for a "Marshall Plan" for the Middle East? No, for the same reasons that held a few years ago. As even the World Bank acknowledges, increased aid erodes "the quality of governance." 

(Incidentally, the whole Marshall Plan invocation is stupendously wrong as a matter of economic history. As Tyler Cowen wrote more than 30 years ago, the aid package's role in post-war recovery is a myth: "The countries which got the most help, like Greece and Austria, didn't begin to recover until the aid was nearing its end. Others, like France, Germany and Italy, were recovering even before the help arrived.")

So if not sending in massive amounts of comedians and foreign aid, what is to be done? For starters, it's probably a good idea not to spend 15 years bombing and occupying the Middle East as a prelude to fixing things up. Seriously, the lack of serious discussion about the role of war and foreign policy in conversations about "the rise of extremism" is nothing short of baffling to me. Second, the United States and other Western nations might think less about getting more involved in the day-to-day running of the Middle East and more about doing business with those countries and allowing as many people who want to leave the area find safe passage and a future in our own nations. That may be less dramatic and spectacular than letting a million ribbon-cutting ceremonies bloom at new buildings and rec centers built with foreign aid, but it would have the advantage of possibly actually helping people.

VirginiaKeith Allen Harward spent more than 30 years behind bars for a crime he didn't commit in part because prosecutors withheld DNA evidence that could've been used in his defense.

A. Barton Hinkle writes:

Swabs from the rape kit in Harward's case included blood-type evidence that, his appeal says, "excluded Mr. Harward as the perpetrator." But that evidence was "never provided Mr. Harward or his counsel. This information was not only suppressed but also falsely characterized as 'inconclusive' by the Commonwealth's forensic expert at trial."

As the Richmond Times-Dispatch's Frank Green has reported, the work of that expert—David Pomposini—also has been involved in another wrongful conviction case, concerning a man named Troy Webb. Webb spent eight years in prison for rape before DNA cleared him.

Harward and Webb are preceded by other well-known innocents set free long after conviction. Thomas Haynesworth spent 27 years in prison for rapes committed by another man. Earl Washington spent 17 years in prison for crimes that DNA proved he did not commit—including several years on death row and six more years even after his exoneration.

Still, that Harward's lawyers never got to see evidence that could have kept another innocent man out of prison—while the guilty one went free—ought to chasten the members of the Virginia Supreme Court.

Credit: Library of CongressThomas Jefferson, the Virginia statesman, principal author of the Declaration of Independence, and third president of the United States, was born on this day in 1743. Jefferson was a brilliant theorist and politician who, to say the very least, had an outsized impact on the course of American history. Yet Jefferson was also a deeply flawed individual, a man who could champion the idea that "all men are created equal" while at the same time owning numerous slaves. To mark Jefferson's birthday today, and to reflect on his complicated legacy, here's an excerpt from my take on "The Trouble With Thomas Jefferson," an essay which first appeared in Reason's January 2009 issue:

Does the fact that Thomas Jefferson owned slaves—probably including his own children—negate the wonderful things he wrote about inalienable rights in the Declaration of Independence? To put it another way, why should anyone listen to what Master Jefferson (or other slaveholding Founders) had to say about liberty and equality?

It's important to remember that the idea of inalienable rights didn’t start or stop in the year 1776. The historian Gordon S. Wood, in his superb 1991 book The Radicalism of the American Revolution, argues that "to focus, as we are apt to do, on what the Revolution did not accomplish—highlighting and lamenting its failure to abolish slavery and change fundamentally the lot of women—is to miss the great significance of what it did accomplish." In Wood's view, by destroying monarchical rule and replacing it with republicanism, the American revolutionaries "made possible the anti-slavery and women's rights movements of the nineteenth century and in fact all our current egalitarian thinking." They upended "their societies as well as their governments…only they did not know—they could scarcely have imagined—how much of their society they would change."

As evidence, consider two very different figures whose lives intersected with slavery in the 19th century: the abolitionist Frederick Douglass and the pro-slavery politician John C. Calhoun. An escaped slave and self-taught author and orator, Douglass understood better than most just how potent the Declaration’s promise of inalienable rights could be. "Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty? That he is the rightful owner of his own body?" Douglass would demand of his mostly white audiences. "There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven that does not know that slavery is wrong for him."

Calhoun, by contrast, believed the Declaration's assertion that "all men are created equal" was "the most dangerous of all political error." As he put it in an 1848 speech, "For a long time it lay dormant; but in the process of time it began to germinate, and produce its poisonous fruits." This false notion of equality, Calhoun continued, "had strong hold on the mind of Mr. Jefferson…which caused him to take an utterly false view of the subordinate relation of the black to the white race in the South; and to hold, in consequence, that the former, though utterly unqualified to possess liberty, were as fully entitled to both liberty and equality as the latter."

Think about what Calhoun is saying here. The idea that "all men are created equal" has slowly developed in the American consciousness, producing the "poisonous fruits" of the anti-slavery movement. Jefferson may or may not have intended such an outcome; he certainly did little actively to bring it about, though he did denounce slavery and its brutalizing impact on white society. But the libertarian ideas that inspired Jefferson, the ones coursing through the Declaration of Independence and later through the Constitution, nonetheless did bring it about. Douglass welcomed that result; Calhoun despised it.

Read the whole thing here.