The Armed Citizen

Laughs

One tequila, two tequila, three tequila, floor.

Atheism is a non-prophet organization.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

If a deaf child signs swear words, does his mother wash his hands with soap?

What do you do when you see an endangered animal eating an endangered plant?

I a parsley farmer is sued, can they garnish his wages?

Would a fly without wings be called a walk?

Can vegetarians eat animal crackers?

If the police arrest a mute, do they tell him he has the right to remain silent?

Does the mermaid wear an algebra?

Do infants enjoy infancy as much as adults enjoy adultery?

How is it possible to have a civil war?

If you eat both pasta and antipasto, are you still hungry?

If you try to fail, and succeed, which have you done?

Did Obama Spy on Trump?

Here is an article by Judge Andrew Napolitano.  It is important not for what it says about spying on Trump, but for what it reveals about our loss of freedom.

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The question of whether former President Barack Obama actually spied on President Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign and transition has been tantalizing Washington since President Trump first made the allegation nearly two weeks ago. Since then, three investigations have been launched — one by the FBI, one by the House of Representatives and one by the Senate. Are the investigators chasing a phantom, or did this actually happen?

Here is the back story.

Obama would not have needed a warrant to authorize surveillance on Trump. Obama was the president and as such enjoyed authority under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to order surveillance on any person in America, without suspicion, probable cause or a warrant.

FISA contemplates that the surveillance it authorizes will be for national security purposes, but this is an amorphous phrase and an ambiguous standard that has been the favorite excuse of most modern presidents for extraconstitutional behavior. In the early 1970s, President Richard Nixon used national security as a pretext to deploying the FBI and CIA to spy on students and even to break into the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, one of his tormentors.

FISA was enacted in the late 1970s to force the federal government to focus its surveillance activities — its domestic national security-based spying — on only those people who were more likely than not agents of a foreign government. Because FISA authorizes judges on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to make rules and establish procedures for surveillance — essentially lawmaking — in secret, the public and the media have been largely kept in the dark about the nature and extent of the statute and the legal and moral rationale for the federal government's spying on everyone in the U.S.

The mass spying that these judges have ruled FISA authorizes is directly counter to the wording, meaning and purpose of FISA itself, which was enacted to prevent just what it has in fact now unleashed.

We now know indisputably that this secret FISA court — whose judges cannot keep records of their own work and have their pockets and briefcases checked by guards as they enter and leave the courthouse — has permitted all spying on everyone all the time.

The FISA court only hears lawyers for the government, and they have convinced it that it is more efficient to capture the digital versions of everyone's phone calls, texts, emails and other digital traffic than it is to force the government — as the Constitution requires — to focus on only those who there is reason to believe are more likely than not engaging in unlawful acts.

When FISA was written, telephone surveillance was a matter of wiretapping — installing a wire onto the target's telephone line, either inside or outside the home or business, and listening to or recording in real time the conversations that were audible on the tapped line.

Today the National Security Agency has 24/7 access to the mainframe computers of all telecom providers and all computer service providers and to all digital traffic carried by fiber optics in the U.S. The NSA has had this access pursuant to FISA court orders issued in 2005 and renewed every 90 days. The FISA court has based its rulings on its own essentially secret convoluted logic, never subjected to public scrutiny. That has resulted in the universal surveillance state in which we in America now live. The NSA has never denied this.

Thus, in 2016, when Trump says the surveillance of him took place, Obama needed only to ask the NSA for a transcript of Trump's telephone conversations to be prepared from the digital versions that the NSA already possessed. Because the NSA has the digital version of every telephone call made to, from and within the U.S. since 2005, if President Obama last year wanted transcripts of Trump's calls made at any time, the NSA would have been duty-bound to provide them, just as it would be required to provide transcripts of Obama's calls today if President Trump wanted them.

But if Obama did order the NSA to prepare transcripts of Trump's conversations last fall under the pretext of national security — to find out whether Trump was communicating with the Russians would have been a good excuse — there would exist somewhere a record of such an order. For that reason, if Obama did this, he no doubt used a source on which he'd leave no fingerprints.

Enter James Bond.

Sources have told Fox News that the British foreign surveillance service, the Government Communications Headquarters, known as GCHQ, most likely provided Obama with transcripts of Trump's calls. The NSA has given GCHQ full 24/7 access to its computers, so GCHQ — a foreign intelligence agency that, like the NSA, operates outside our constitutional norms — has the digital versions of all electronic communications made in America in 2016, including Trump's. So by bypassing all American intelligence services, Obama would have had access to what he wanted with no Obama administration fingerprints.

Thus, when senior American intelligence officials denied that their agencies knew about this, they were probably being truthful. Adding to this ominous scenario is the fact that three days after Trump's inauguration, the head of GCHQ, Robert Hannigan, abruptly resigned, stating that he wished to spend more time with his family.

I hope the investigations of Trump's allegation discover and reveal the truth — whatever it is. But the lesson here is terribly serious. We face the gravest threat to personal liberty since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 proscribed criticism of the government. We have an unelected, unnamed, unaccountable elite group in the intelligence community manipulating the president at will and possessing intimate, detailed knowledge about all of us that it can reveal. We have statutes that have given the president unconstitutional powers that have apparently been used. And we have judges on secret courts facilitating all this as if the Constitution didn't exist.

For how much longer will we have freedom?

Could Fast Radio Bursts be due to extragalactic civilizations?

Here is  a link to an article concerning the possibility that Fast Radio Bursts are from extragalactic civilizations.

Here is the abstract

We examine the possibility that Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) originate from the activity of extragalactic civilizations. Our analysis shows that beams used for powering large light sails could yield parameters that are consistent with FRBs. The characteristic diameter of the beam emitter is estimated through a combination of energetic and engineering constraints, and both approaches intriguingly yield a similar result which is on the scale of a large rocky planet. Moreover, the optimal frequency for powering the light sail is shown to be similar to the detected FRB frequencies. These ‘coincidences’ lend some credence to the possibility that FRBs might be artificial in origin. Other relevant quantities, such as the characteristic mass of the light sail, and the angular velocity of the beam, are also derived. By using the FRB occurrence rate, we infer upper bounds on the rate of FRBs from extragalactic civilizations in a typical galaxy. The possibility of detecting fainter signals is briefly discussed, and the wait time for an exceptionally bright FRB event in the Milky Way is estimated.

Hacking and the Politics of Moral Outrage

Here is a column by Jonathan Turley.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University and teaches a course on the Constitution and the Supreme Court.

JT provides needed perspective.  He is on target.  And he is a liberal.

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With the chorus of calls for an “independent counsel” or “special prosecutor” to investigate the Russian hacking scandal, there has been one element that remains rather ambiguous: what is the specific crime to be investigated?  Clearly there is the hacking but that crime is well-known and was committed by Russians who are unlikely to be subject to any real investigation.  A special counsel, as opposed to a bipartisan commission, would require the articulation of a crime and the basis for the investigation.  I am all in favor of independent investigations of this and other issues. However, if we are going to move beyond a special commission to special counsel we need to have more evidence and a notion of what we are investigating. That may come but we are not there yet.  Below is my column in The Hill Newspaper on the subject — and the moral outrage over hacking.

In a time of virtually complete political polarization, there is one point upon which both parties appear to agree: moral outrage at the notion of Russian attempts to influence our election.

There are bipartisan demands for a special prosecutor and a full criminal investigation.  However, while the outrage is most evident, the alleged crime is more difficult to discern.  Before we order a massive independent investigation, it might be useful to examine both the basis for the self-evident outrage and the less-than-evident crime.

Moral outrage as political necessity

As our politicians went on the air to vent their disgust over Russians trying to influence our election, there was an interesting study published this month on moral outrage in an academic journal, Motivation and Emotion.  The researchers found that moral outrage is rooted, not in altruism, but self-interest — often to affirm one’s own status and avoiding responsibilities or guilt.

“Individuals,” the study notes, “respond to reminders of their group’s moral culpability with feelings of outrage at third-party harm-doing.”  The most astonishing aspect of this study is that it was not done entirely on Capitol Hill.

Many other countries can be forgiven if they are a bit confused by the expressions of outrage at the notion that Russia hacked emails or tried to influence our election.  The United States objecting to hacking or influencing elections is akin to Bernie Sanders expressing disgust over accounting irregularities.

The United States has not only extensively engaged in surveillance in other countries but hacked the accounts of our closest allies, including the personal communications of German Chancellor Angela Merkel.  Moreover, our country has a long history of direct interference in foreign elections from overthrowing governments to funding opposition movements.

One study found 81 different instances of the United States interfering with the elections of other countries between 1946 and 2000. We learned from the best; foreign interference in our country goes back to 1700s when France and Britain actively sought to influence our early governments.

Democratic leadership have a particular interest in expressing moral outrage over the election. The extent to which the election becomes an example of “third-party harm-doing,” the less attention will be drawn toward the party establishment which virtually anointed Hillary Clinton as their candidate despite polls showing that voters wanted someone outside of the establishment.

Not only did they select the single greatest establishment figure, but someone with record negative polling.  “The Russians did it” is a much better narrative.

Of course, the Russians did not “hack the election.”  No votes were fabricated.  Indeed, there is no proof of emails being fabricated (despite the claims of some Democratic leaders like Donna Brazile at the time).  The reason the public has not risen up in anger is that it is hard to get the public outraged over being shown the duplicitous and dishonest character of their leaders — even if the release was clearly one-sided against Democrats.

The public has every right to be outraged, but the outrage of our government officials would make Claude Rains blush.

Moral outrage in search of a crime

In the end, Russian attempts to influence our election should be a matter of national concern and investigation, though we would be in a far superior position if we acknowledged our own checkered past in such efforts.  However, the call for a “Special Counsel” or “independent prosecutor” seems a bit premature since we do not have a clear crime other than the hacking itself (which has already been confirmed).

Clearly the Russians hacked DNC emails but we do not need a special counsel to confirm extensive hacking operations by a host of different countries. It is like complaining about the weather.

Dana Boente, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia (and the acting deputy attorney general), could determine that an investigation by the Justice Department would still present a conflict of interest even after the recusal of Attorney General Jeff Sessions.  The process for the appointment of special counsels through the courts lapsed in 1999.  Thus, the current standard would involve Boente determining that the “criminal investigation of a person or matter is warranted” and must be done outside of the Department.  But what is the crime under investigation?

The suggestions that Sessions committed perjury are far-fetched and unsupported.

Some have suggested violations of the Logan Act. However, that 1799 law concerns calls for the fine or imprisonment of private citizens who attempt to intervene in disputes or controversies between the United States and foreign governments.  It has never been used to convict a United States citizen and does not appear material to these allegations.  If there were monetary payments to influence the election, that would constitute a crime but there has yet to be evidence such crimes.

Finally, there do appear to have been criminal leaks during and after the election.  However, those are insular, conventional matters for investigation by the Justice Department.

We generally do not start special counsel investigations absent a clear articulated and supportable criminal allegation.  There are a host of obvious political or policy concerns that could be the subject of an independent investigation by a commission or joint legislative/executive effort.  There are real concerns over conflicts in the current administration given the focus on the presidential election.

Yet, we are simply likely to confirm much of what we know: we were hacked.  We are also likely to confront what many do not want to discuss: we have hacked others for years.

Until there is more evidence of a crime by United States citizens, there is little reason for a special counsel as opposed to the current investigations.  We should investigate the hacking and efforts to influence our elections, certainly. But our politicians may want to leave the moral outrage and hypocrisy behind.

The decline of free speech (and freedom) in America

Here is a column by Jonathan Turley.  He is on target.

As Turley says: "we are raising a generation of intolerant (and at times violent) censors".

Here is JT's column.

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We have been discussing the rising intolerance and violence on college campuses, particularly against conservative speakers.  The latest such example can be found at Middlebury College where Professor Allison Stanger was assaulted by protesters and injured after she merely accompanied a controversial speaker to campus. It was a disgraceful but increasingly common scene on our campuses as students fought to prevent others from hearing opposing views or speakers.


Stanger was accompanying Charles Murray, a political scientist and author of the controversial “The Bell Curve” ( asserted that different races has different intelligence levels).  Protesters succeeded in preventing his speaking at the original location on campus and he was moved to another location for a closed circuit broadcast.  However, when Stanger, Murray and a college administrator left McCullough Student Center after the event, they were “physically and violently confronted by a group of protestors,” according to Bill Burger, the college’s vice president for communications and marketing.

The three retreated to an administrator’s car but Burger said “The protestors then violently set upon the car, rocking it, pounding on it, jumping on and try to prevent it from leaving campus. At one point a large traffic sign was thrown in front of the car. . . . During this confrontation outside McCullough, one of the demonstrators pulled Prof. Stanger’s hair and twisted her neck . . . She was attended to at Porter Hospital later and (on Friday) is wearing a neck brace.”

There is no indication however of a single arrest or a single disciplinary action against the protesters.  The College president admitted that some of those responsible were students and yet there was no effort to punish those responsible for silencing free speech or violently attacking the speaker and faculty member.

The chilling scene at Middlebury is the result of years of erosion of free speech principles and protections at academic institutions.  Faculty have led the effort to declare certain speech to be hostile or intolerant (and thus not protected).  They have taken campuses that were once bastions of free speech and turned them into towers of intolerance.  That ignoble legacy was more than evidence in the letter from 450 alumni who denounced the visit of Murray and rejected basic notions of free speech.  The letter shows the utter ease and comfort that students and alumni now display in simply declaring certain views as unworthy of protection. There was even a subtle dig at Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway:

However, in this case we find the principle does not apply, due to not only the nature, but also the quality, of Dr. Murray’s scholarship. . . .  If Dr. Murray’s scholarship is of blatantly dreadful quality — and we hold, along with so many of his colleagues, that it is — then what is the point of “debating” his views? How, and why, does one go about arguing in good faith with a scholar whose entire intellectual premise consists of what are now being called, incredibly, “alternative facts”?

Since Dr. Murray’s views are not worth engaging on these grounds, this can hardly be called an occasion for open, rigorous academic debate. His invitation to campus, then, is not an educational opportunity, but a threat. It is a message to every woman, every person of color, every first-generation student, every poor and working-class person, every disabled person and every queer person that not only their acceptance to and presence at Middlebury, but also their safety, their agency, their humanity and even their very right to exist are all up for “debate.”

So just hearing an opposing viewpoint is now a “threat” and categorically unworthy of debate or protection.  Of course, the threat that injured Professor Stanger was quite real and came from the very individuals claiming to be victimized by his exercise of free speech.  What is interesting is the tone of the coverage of the latest violence by protesters against conservatives or libertarians on campus.  The Boston Globe had a story of liberal protesters assaulting and injuring a professor in their effort to prevent the exercise of free speech.  The newspaper entitled its article “Protesters Aggressively Confront Controversial Speaker at Middlebury College.”   “Aggressively confront”?  They first moved to block anyone hearing his views and then assaulted the author and a faculty member.

Incidents like the one at Middlebury are shocking reminders that we are raising a generation of intolerant (and at times violent) censors.  We have taught students that free speech is no longer the value that we strive to preserve but the threat to their very existence.  As a result, they have developed a sense of entitlement in the silencing of opposing voices. Indeed, they now view the fight against free speech as a noble cause. They do that by simply claiming (as they do in this letter) that opposing speakers are not really engaging in free speech at all but rather incitement or hatred or the ill-defined “microaggressions.”  It is a license to silence others and to select what speech is worthy to be heard on campus.

Middlebury insists that it was shocked by the violence on campus.  If so, it should start by expelling students who refuse to allow opposing voices to be heard and take violent action when others do not yield to their demands.  As I discussed in an earlier column, a few schools (led by the University of Chicago) have stood firm in support of free speech and against the slippery slope of censorship advocated by many academics.  It may be the single greatest and defining moment of the American academy.

It will not be easy to regain the ground lost.  University administrators are not known for their steadfast fealty to principle when facing threats of protests or condemnations as microaggressors or advocates of white privilege.  There are also academics who actively teach how speech is a threat to equality and a tool for privilege.  Few academics want to be labeled as racially insensitive or reactionary.  However, it has been the silence of most academics that has allowed this trend to grow and mutate across our campuses.

Jokes

Undermining Academic Achievement

Here is a column by Walter Williams.

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University.

WW is on target.  The Democrats are not the friends of the children of poor parents.

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U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement, “The president’s decision to ask Betsy DeVos to run the Department of Education should offend every single American man, woman, and child who has benefitted from the public education system in this country.” Expressing similar sentiments, Congressional Black Caucus Chairman Cedric Richmond said, “I expect that Mrs. DeVos will have an incredibly harmful impact on public education and on black communities nationwide.” Those and many other criticisms of Department of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos could be dismissed as simply political posturing if we did not have an educational system that is mostly mediocre and is in advanced decay for most black students.

According to The Nation’s Report Card, only 37 percent of 12th-graders were proficient in reading in 2015, and just 25 percent were proficient in math (https://www.nationsreportcard.gov). For black students, achievement levels were a disgrace. Nationally, 17 percent of black students scored proficient in reading, and 7 percent scored proficient in math. In some cities, such as Detroit, black academic proficiency is worse; among eighth-graders, only 4 percent were proficient in math, and only 7 percent were proficient in reading.

The nation’s high-school graduation rate rose again in the 2014-15 school year, reaching a record high as more than 83 percent of students earned a diploma on time. Educators see this as some kind of achievement and congratulate themselves. The tragedy is that high-school graduation has little relevance to achievement.

In 2014-15, graduation rates at District of Columbia Public Schools, just as they did nationally, climbed to an all-time high. At H.D. Woodson High School, 76 percent of students graduated on time; however, just 1 percent met math standards on national standardized tests linked to the Common Core academic standards. Just 4 percent met the reading standards.

The low black academic achievement is not restricted to high-school graduates of D.C. schools. The average black high-school graduate has the academic achievement level of a white seventh- or eighth-grader. As such, it stands as unambiguous evidence that high schools confer diplomas attesting that students can read, write and compute at a 12th-grade level when in fact they cannot. That means they have received fraudulent high-school diplomas. There are many factors that affect education that educators cannot control. But they have total control over the issuance of a diploma.

Educators often complain that there’s not enough money. Census Bureau data show that as early as 2009-10, Washington, D.C., spent $29,409 per pupil (http://tinyurl.com/gp4ht8k). Starker proof that there’s little relationship between spending and academic proficiency is in the case of Detroit’s public schools. In 2009-10, the nation’s elementary and secondary public school systems spent an average of $10,615 per pupil. According to the Census Bureau, Detroit schools spent $12,801 per pupil. The Mackinac Center for Public Policy claims that Detroit actually spent $15,570 per pupil that year. There’s not much payoff for education dollars. The National Institute for Literacy found that 47 percent of the city’s adults are “functionally illiterate.” The Nation’s Report Card reports that Detroit students score the lowest among the nation’s big-city schools, and Washington is not far behind
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I’d ask Sen. Schumer how it would be possible for Secretary of Education DeVos to make education any worse than it is for many Americans. I’d suggest to Rep. Richmond that if the grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan were the secretary of education and wanted to sabotage black academic achievement, he couldn’t find a better method for doing so than keeping our public school system as it is. Many black politicians and educators would never have their own children attend the rotten, dangerous schools that are so much a part of our big cities. Many black parents, captured by these schools, would like to get their children out. But that’s not in the interest of the education establishment, which wants a monopoly on education. Black politicians and academics are the establishment’s facilitators. That explains their hostility to Betsy DeVos. She would like to give more parents a choice.

Minimum Wage and Discrimination

Here is a column by Walter Williams.  Dr. Walter Williams is an American economist, commentator, and academic. He is the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics at George Mason University, as well as a syndicated columnist and author known for his libertarian views.

Ye who claim that you would like to help the most disadvantaged by raising the minimum wage need to learn why it would achieve the opposite.

A good test of whether you are likely to waste your time listening to someone is if they believe a higher minimum wage would help the worst off.

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There is little question in most academic research that increases in the minimum wage lead to increases in unemployment.

The debatable issue is the magnitude of the increase. An issue not often included in minimum wage debates is the substitution effects of minimum wage increases.

The substitution effect might explain why Business for a Fair Minimum Wage, a national network of business owners and executives, argues for higher minimum wages.

Let's look at substitution effects in general.

When the price of anything rises, people seek substitutes and measures to economize. When gasoline prices rise, people seek to economize on the usage of gas by buying smaller cars.

If the price of sugar rises, people seek cheaper sugar substitutes. If prices of goods in one store rise, people search for other stores.

This last example helps explain why some businessmen support higher minimum wages.

If they could impose higher labor costs on their less efficient competition, it might help drive them out of business. That would enable firms that survive to charge higher prices and earn greater profits.

There's a more insidious substitution effect of higher minimum wages. You see it by putting yourself in the place of a businessman who has to pay at least the minimum wage to anyone he hires. Say that you are hiring typists. There are some who can type 40 words per minute and others, equal in every other respect, who can type 80 words per minute.

Whom would you hire?

I'm guessing you'd hire the more highly skilled. Thus, one effect of the minimum wage is discrimination against the employment of lower-skilled workers. In some places, the minimum wage is $15 an hour. But if a lower-skilled worker could offer to work for, say, $8 an hour, you might hire him.

In addition to discrimination against lower-skilled workers, the minimum wage denies them the chance of sharpening their skills and ultimately earning higher wages.

The most effective form of training for most of us is on-the-job training.

An even more insidious substitution effect of minimum wages can be seen from a few quotations.

During South Africa's apartheid era, racist unions, which would never accept a black member, were the major supporters of minimum wages for blacks.

In 1925, the South African Economic and Wage Commission said, "The method would be to fix a minimum rate for an occupation or craft so high that no Native would be likely to be employed." Gert Beetge, secretary of the racist Building Workers' Union, complained, "There is no job reservation left in the building industry, and in the circumstances, I support the rate for the job (minimum wage) as the second-best way of protecting our white artisans." "Equal pay for equal work" became the rallying slogan of the South African white labor movement. These laborers knew that if employers were forced to pay black workers the same wages as white workers, there'd be reduced incentive to hire blacks.

South Africans were not alone in their minimum wage conspiracy against blacks. After a bitter 1909 strike by the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen in the U.S., an arbitration board decreed that blacks and whites were to be paid equal wages. Union members expressed their delight, saying, "If this course of action is followed by the company and the incentive for employing the Negro thus removed, the strike will not have been in vain."

Our nation's first minimum wage law, the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, had racist motivation. During its legislative debate, its congressional supporters made such statements as, "That contractor has cheap colored labor that he transports, and he puts them in cabins, and it is labor of that sort that is in competition with white labor throughout the country." During hearings, American Federation of Labor President William Green complained, "Colored labor is being sought to demoralize wage rates."

Today's stated intentions behind the support of minimum wages are nothing like yesteryear's. However, intentions are irrelevant. In the name of decency, we must examine the effects.