The Weekly Sift

How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to.

— George Orwell, 1984

They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type.

— Edward Snowden, NSA whistleblower

This week everybody was talking about the surveillance state

In a series of revelations made through The Guardian and The Washington Post, whistleblower Edward Snowden exposed how the NSA collects information on everyone, even people who have no connection to terrorism and have not done anything to raise suspicion.

In PRISM and Privacy, I collect links to the key articles and discuss how to think about them. (My conclusions are more radical than you probably expect.) But whether you click through to that or not, you should watch this 12-minute interview Glen Greenwald did with Snowden in Hong Kong on Thursday.

and Republican reform

Last Monday, the College Republicans told their party how it needs to change if it’s going to appeal to young voters. They wrote an insightful report, but I doubt the GOP will be able to follow their advice. I put the details in a separate article, Smart Kids.

and you also might be interested in …

Tennessee is one of several Republican-dominated states that are refusing federal money to expand Medicaid as part of the Affordable Care Act. Their substitute program can only be explained by The Daily Show.

Another front on which corporate personhood has been advancing for decades: Corporations claim First Amendment rights in situations that don’t look anything like free-speech cases.

Isn’t it interesting that — at the precise moment in our history when inequality is skyrocketing, when corporate profits are rising and wages shrinking — we have a corporate-funded movement that blames the failures of our inner-city public schools on lazy teachers and their unions?

I learned journalism on my high school newspaper. That makes me a dinosaur, because high-school papers are going extinct.

Speaking of high school, The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a fabulous article explaining why he was such a bad student. When he speaks to students now

I try to get them to think of education not as something that pleases their teachers, but as a ticket out into a world so grand and stunning that it defies their imagination. My belief is that, if I can get them to understand the “why?” of education, then the effort and hard work and long study hours will come after.

Coates is largely self-educated in adulthood. The problem wasn’t that he was lazy or stupid.

I recall sitting in my seventh-grade French class repeating over and over “Il fait froid. Il fait chaud.” Why was I learning French? Who did I know that spoke French? Where is France? Do they even really talk like this? Well, yeah, they kinda do. I figured that out at 37. And now I find myself clutching flashcards, repeating “Il fait froid. Il fait chaud.”

He believes poor black kids in inner-city schools want to be rappers or athletes (and work pretty hard at it sometimes) because that’s the only kind of wonder they get to see. If they understood education as a way to open up more wonder, they might work pretty hard at that too.

Remember the guy at CPAC from the White Students Union? The guy who wondered why Frederick Douglass would need to forgive his owner for “giving him shelter and food”?

What if you were his fiction-writing professor, like Ben Warner? Warner’s article in Salon is a meditation on the ambiguities of remaining in human relationship with people despite their politics, despite your inability to influence them.

Finally, it doesn’t get any cooler than …

a treehouse made of mirrors.

We must define our effort not as a boundless “global war on terror,” but rather as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America. …  As our fight enters a new phase, America’s legitimate claim of self-defense cannot be the end of the discussion.  To say a military tactic is legal, or even effective, is not to say it is wise or moral in every instance. For the same human progress that gives us the technology to strike half a world away also demands the discipline to constrain that power — or risk abusing it. 

— President Obama, Thursday at the National Defense University

This week everybody was talking about the Oklahoma tornado

I assume you already know the basics, which have gotten 24/7 coverage.

A side issue is whether or not we can blame global warming. In general, as the planet warms there is more heat in the ocean and more moisture in the atmosphere, creating the potential for more violent storms. However, from year-to-year or even decade-to-decade, the tornadoes in one particular area are subject to a lot of other factors.

So, for example, the U.S. had unusually few tornadoes in 2012, probably because of the drought in Tornado Alley. Did climate change cause the altered precipitation patterns that created the drought? Maybe, but we’re getting a little speculative now. (I’m always suspicious when both too much and too little of something — i.e., tornadoes — produce the same explanation.)

I know that conservatives claim global warming is refuted whenever some town gets late-season snow. So it sucks to feel obligated to stick to facts and reason. But as Grist’s Susie Cagle puts it:

the science on tornadoes and climate change isn’t clear enough to OMFG about it just yet.

Here’s my rule of thumb: Am I willing to accept the validity of this measurement if it turns against my favored theory in the future? In other words: If for the next year or two the number and severity of tornadoes in Oklahoma goes down again, will I feel like global warming is refuted? My answer is no, which means I shouldn’t put too much stock in the global-warming/tornado connection now.

On the other hand, I would reconsider if the Earth had a genuinely cold year — colder than the 100-year average — with no obvious event like a major volcano to explain it. So when April turned out to be the 338th consecutive month with an average global temperature above the 20th-century average, I thought that was significant. In other words: If you’re 28 or younger, you’ve never experienced a globally cool month.

and President Obama’s speech

Thursday at the National Defense University, President Obama recognized that American democracy can’t survive an endless global war. I summarize in “This War Must End”.

and the IRS

As no trail to the White House emerges and the scandal hinges on how the regulations define 501(c)(3)s and 501(c)(4)s, you have to wonder: What Happens to a Scandal With Boring Details? Prediction: The mainstream media will lose interest, but the conservative media will invent whatever exciting details it needs to keep its audience aroused.

and the I-5 bridge collapse in Washington

The cartoon is actually a reaction to the 2007 bridge collapse in Minneapolis, but nothing has really changed. Which bridge will go down next? New York Magazine suggests that it could be one of the busiest bridges in the Northeast: the Tappan Zee.

Since no one died this time, I don’t think I can be accused of “politicizing the tragedy” to point out that President Obama’s American Jobs Act of 2011 included $50 billion for infrastructure improvements. It could not overcome a Republican filibuster. The proposal has been back every year since, and is now part of Obama’s 2014 budget proposal.

It’s entirely legit for Republicans to wonder how the necessary work will be paid for, but it’s not legit to just block Obama’s proposal. If Republicans don’t offer an alternative infrastructure plan, then their plan is to keep watching our bridges fall down.

and atheism

I can’t remember a week where atheism popped up in so many stories.

Wednesday, Pope Francis raised eyebrows (and hopes, maybe) by seeming to say that atheists can go to the Heaven they don’t believe in:

The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! ‘Father, the atheists?’ Even the atheists. Everyone!

Then Father Thomas Rosica — quoted on CNN’s Belief Blog as a “Vatican spokesman” in a post that countless other articles linked to — seemed to take it all back, saying that Pope Francis’ homilies speak to the typical Catholic as a “pastor and preacher”, not “in the context of a theological faculty or academy”, and that the Pope had “no intention of provoking a theological debate on the nature of salvation”. Rosica reiterated that

Catholics believe that it is only in Jesus Christ that this salvation is conferred, and through Christianity and the one Church that it must be mediated to all people.

Fine, except … Rosica wasn’t writing as a Vatican spokesman and didn’t claim to be. He was an official spokesman during the transition from Benedict to Francis, but Wikipedia says “He completed his service upon the election and inauguration of Petrine Ministry of Pope Francis.” So although Rosica probably understands the Pope’s mind far better than I do, in this case his opinion is just his opinion. [BTW: Need I mention how disappointed I am that CNN didn’t get this right? It’s not hard.]

Tuesday, Representative Juan Mendez delivered a secular humanist invocation to begin a session of the Arizona legislature.

I would like to ask that you not bow your heads. I would like to ask that you take a moment to look around the room at all of the men and women here, in this moment, sharing together this extraordinary experience of being alive and of dedicating ourselves to working toward improving the lives of the people in our state.

Wednesday, another legislator said, “That’s not a prayer” and led the legislature in a second daily Christian prayer as “repentance” for the previous day. That display of Christian supremacism led third member to object:

I want to remind the House and my colleagues and everybody here that several of us here are not Christianized. I’m a traditional Navajo, so I stand here every day and participate in prayers … This is the United States, this is America, and we all represent different people … and you need to respect that. Your God is no more powerful than my God. We all come from the same creator.

Most striking of all was the viral video where CNN’s Wolf Blitzer described Rebecca Vitsmun (an Oklahoma tornado survivor) as “blessed” and pushed her to “thank the Lord” for her and her baby escaping harm, prompting her to confess “I’m actually an atheist.” She was very gracious and dignified about it: “I don’t blame anyone for thanking the Lord.”

The Oklahoma Freethought Convention is selling “I’m actually an atheist” t-shirts. Proceeds will help Vitsmun rebuild her home.

Blitzer’s clumsy interview points out the amount of religious propaganda we take for granted whenever natural disaster strikes. (Funny how nobody on TV ever says, “The randomness of this destruction reinforces my belief that sometimes stuff just happens and you can’t take it personally.”) Slate’s Mark Joseph Stein called out the tunnel vision in ABC’s reporting of the “miracle ending” at Briarwood school, where no children died.

The families and friends of the seven children who died at Plaza Towers would not consider this ending really all that miraculous.

Which reminds me of something Bertrand Russell wrote in 1943:

God’s mercies are curiously selective. Toplady, the author of “Rock of Ages,” moved from one vicarage to another; a week after the move, the vicarage he had formerly occupied burnt down, with great loss to the new vicar. Thereupon Toplady thanked God; but what the new vicar did is not known.

and you also might be interested in …

Last week I talked about how Jonathan Karl’s dishonest journalism on Benghazi briefly made it look like there really was a White House cover-up. It turns out we should have seen that coming. Two years ago, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) had him pegged as a “right-wing mole at ABC News“. He comes out of the same conservative program that gave us Ann Coulter, Dinesh D’Souza, Michelle Malkin, Rich Lowry and Laura Ingraham.

Words you never thought you’d read here: Go, Jan Brewer.

This “shocking news” about ObamaCare is good news: The California exchanges are offering healthcare policies for less money than expected.

Tuesday, Apple CEO Tim Cook testified to a Senate committee about the tricks that allow his company to make many billions of dollars and pay very little tax in the U.S. or anywhere else. The business-news blog Quartz has a good summary of the problems in corporate tax law and how Apple abuses them.

Corporations and their political sock puppets often make the case for a “tax holiday” that would allow companies to bring overseas profits to the U.S. at a lower tax rate. It’s worth noting that a lot of this money is “overseas” only in some theoretical tax-law sense. Quartz reports: “Most of the $102 billion Apple is keeping ‘overseas’ is in US banks.”

After a British soldier was hacked to death in London Wednesday, Glenn Greenwald raised this question: Is there any reasonable definition of the word terrorism that includes this act, but not U.S. drone strikes in places like Pakistan or Yemen?

Can it really be the case that when western nations continuously kill Muslim civilians, that’s not “terrorism”, but when Muslims kill western soldiers, that is terrorism? … Once you declare that the “entire globe is a battlefield” (which includes London) and that any “combatant” (defined as broadly as possible) is fair game to be killed – as the US has done – then how can the killing of a solider of a nation engaged in that war, horrific though it is, possibly be “terrorism”?

What could be cooler than a solar airplane?

 The statement that God won’t allow us to ruin our planet sweeps aside ethics, responsibilities, consequences, duties, even awareness. It comforts us with the anodyne assumption that—no matter what we do—some undefined presence will, through some undefined measure, make things right, clean up our mess. That is seeking magical deliverance from our troubles, not divine guidance through our troubles. So is God really here just to tidy up after our sins and follies, to immunize us from their consequence?

— Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, 5-8-2013

This week everybody was talking about the Cleveland captives

Last Monday, Amanda Berry, Georgina “Gina” DeJesus, and Michelle Knight were rescued from their 9-to-11-year captivity after Berry escaped and contacted police. The story has been all over the news ever since (to the undoubted consternation of Republican Congressman Darrell Issa, who saw his mega-hyped Benghazi hearings upstaged).

Perversely, when a story gets this much coverage it’s hard to keep track of the facts. Coverage focuses on whatever new detail has just come out, seldom taking a step back to put it all in context for the non-obsessed viewer. The 24-hour news channels feel that they have to keep covering the story or lose viewers, so rather than endlessly repeat the few known facts, they fill the air with speculation. As a result, it’s easy to lose what-actually-happened inside the cloud of what-at-some-point-looked-like-it-might-have-happened.

I rely on Wikipedia to sort it out. We’re not used to thinking of “encyclopedia” and “current events” at the same time, but Wikipedia ends up doing exactly what you need: telling the whole story from the beginning, while constantly updating it with the latest details.

A sub-genre of the Cleveland-kidnapping articles are personal reflections about why stories of captivity and sex-slavery are so arresting, both in real life and in fiction. Slate’s Emily Bazelon expresses just how disempowering this dark fascination can be.

These ordeals are our gothic horror stories, our Bluebeards come to life. I fight my own obsession with them because it fills me with morbid fear and not much else. … [The Silence of the Lambs] terrified me so much that I turned down a summer job I’d wanted as a caretaker on a stretch of the Appalachian Trail. Suddenly I couldn’t handle the idea of being alone and exposed.

What particularly disturbs Bazelon is the thought of being tamed, of reaching the point where you cooperate with your captor. She recommends the novel Room by Emma Donoghue. Being older and male, I flash back to the related horror of John Fowles’ The Collector, where insane fantasies gradually come to seem like plans any guy might carry out if he had the opportunity.

and whether to intervene in Syria

The situation in Syria just keeps getting worse. NATO commander Admiral James Stavridis estimates the number of killed around 100,000, with 1.4 million refugees leaving Syria and another million displaced within the country. That’s from an original population around 22.5 million (just slightly less than Iraq).

What started out as a revolution against a secular dictator has little by little turned into a religious war. The Assad government has never been particularly devout, but the Assad family is from the Alawite branch of Shia, which lives mainly in the coastal areas north of Lebanon. Alawites are 12% of a majority-Sunni country that also has a sizable Christian minority (13%). Alawites dominate Assad’s secret police, and the revolution’s initial support came largely from the inland Sunni areas.

Worse, the war is starting to look like Al Qaeda vs. Hezbollah, as the roles of the primary Sunni and Shia terrorist groups keep growing. The Guardian reports that “entire units [of the rebel Free Syrian Army] have gone over to [Al Qaeda-linked] Jabhat al-Nusra”.

“Fighters are heading to al-Nusra because of its Islamic doctrine, sincerity, good funding and advanced weapons,” said Abu Islam of the FSA’s al-Tawhid brigade in Aleppo. “My colleague who was fighting with the FSA’s Ahrar Suriya asked me: ‘I’m fighting with Ahrar Suriya brigade, but I want to know if I get killed in a battle, am I going to be considered as a martyr or not?’ It did not take him long to quit FSA and join al-Nusra. He asked for a sniper rifle and got one immediately.”

Meanwhile, Hezbollah’s long-rumored involvement in the defense of the Assad regime is getting more explicit. Which is why Admiral Stavridis asks: “Who do you arm? And what happens to those weapons afterward?”

As reports increase that Assad is either using or planning to use chemical weapons, the pressure for the United States to intervene is growing. But Russia is Assad’s main backer, and China also blocks a UN resolution that an anti-Assad international coalition might gather around. So at best this would be another coalition-of-the-willing, not a true international police action.

I don’t pretend to know how things should play out, but I keep thinking of what General Petraeus said about Iraq in 2003: “Tell me how this ends.” American hawks have a bizarre tendency to think of war as a stabilizing force, when history shows the exact opposite. I’m plenty convinced that the situation in Syria is bad; what I’m waiting to hear is how American intervention makes it better.

Here’s Admiral Stavridis’ assessment:

We do have a fairly recent situation that’s somewhat similar to Syria, and that does not fill me with optimism: The Balkans in the 1990s. If you look at Yugoslavia — a nation that was constructed of different ethnic and religious groups. Tito departs the scene, and the region goes through a 10-year process throughout the 1990s. Several million are pushed across borders, requiring the intervention of tens of thousands of Western and Russian troops to bring the situation under control. I think that might be where Syria is headed.

but I wrote about Benghazi

I’ve been ignoring Benghazi, because as best I can tell there’s no there there. Like most things that turn out badly, you can look back and find bad planning, you can wish it had played out differently, and you can find examples of people spinning in hope that they won’t get blamed. But it has turned into yet another episode in the GOP’s Captain Ahab quest for The Scandal That Brings Down Obama. Just like Solyndra and Fast&Furious before it, Benghazi can’t carry that weight.

In Benghazi Hearings: Congress as Reality TV, I compare Republicans’ handling of Benghazi with Democrats’ treatment of 9-11, where there were plenty of conspiracy theories they could have winked at, but didn’t. I speculate about why: Democrats didn’t want to pander to a minority, because it takes a majority to win elections. But Republicans calculate differently, because their party has been taken over by the Conservative Entertainment Complex. A third of the country is a losing voter-block, but it makes one hell of an audience.

and you also might be interested in …

The death total in the collapse factory complex at Bangladesh has reached 1127 as the search for survivors ends. What I said last week here — that we need to act politically as citizens and not just individually as consumers — gets expanded and elaborated in an article I wrote for UU World.

Wednesday, Senator Whitehouse did something more liberals should do: He used religious rhetoric to denounce religion-based global-warming denial.

So why then, when we ignore His plain natural laws, when we ignore the obvious conclusions to be drawn by our God-given intellect and reason, why then would God, the tidy-up God, drop in and spare us?  Why would He allow an innocent child to burn its hand when it touches the hot stove, but protect us from this lesson?  Why would He allow a badly engineered bridge or building to fall, killing innocent people, but protect us from this mistake? Why would He allow cholera to kill in epidemics, until we figure out that the well water is contaminated?  The Earth’s natural laws and our capacity to divine them are God’s great gift to us, allowing us to learn, and build great things, and cure disease.  But God’s gift to us of a planet with natural laws and natural order has, as an integral part of that gift, consequences.

And he closed by pointing out where the real opposition to protecting the planet comes from:

We need to face up to the fact that there is only one leg on which climate denial stands: money.  The polluters give and spend money to create false doubt.  The polluters give and spend money to buy political influence.  The polluters give and spend money to keep polluting.  That’s it.  That’s it.  Not truth, not science, not economics, not safety, not policy, and certainly not religion, nor morality.  Nothing supports climate denial.  Nothing except money.

Meanwhile in the Halls of Mammon, the Wall Street Journal published Harrison Schmitt and William Happer’s “In Defense of Carbon Dioxide“. Unprecedented-in-human-history levels of atmospheric CO2, they tell us, “will benefit the increasing population on the planet by increasing agricultural productivity.”

So who are these guys? Botanists? Climate scientists? Specialists in global agriculture? No. One is a geologist and the other a physicist, and neither has done research in any field relevant to the claims they’re making. But the WSJ sees fit not to mention their most illuminating credentials: Both are connected to think tanks that get funding from the oil industry.

Media Matters debunks their article in detail, including this graphic from the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Conservatives hate it when anyone implies they’re racists, but then they go and do stuff like this: The Heritage Foundation hired a new Ph.D. with a racist thesis, ignored his posting on white nationalist web sites, and made him a co-author on their study denouncing immigration reform.

Kevin Drum (extensively quoting Jonathan Bernstein — a political scientist not to be confused with economist Jared Bernstein) notes the “hack gap” between liberal and conservative economists. There are plenty of bogus correlation-implies-causation points liberals could be making that are comparable to the discredited Reinhart/Rogoff debt-kills-growth argument. For example: Medical costs have been slowing since ObamaCare was passed.

You don’t read stories like “Economist: ObamaCare Already Cutting Health Costs” in the newspaper, though, because liberal economists don’t bend that way. (The recession is the biggest reason for slowing healthcare inflation, and beyond that something is going on that we don’t understand yet.) But conservative economists do. Hence the apparent respectability of austerity economics despite the complete lack of evidence that it has anything to do with reality.

Speaking of austerity, the Washington Post showed its conservative economic bias in an article last Monday. The article reports (correctly) that revenue is up and spending is down, so the government won’t hit its debt limit until October — months later than originally predicted.

That might seem like good news, but it is unraveling Republican plans to force a budget deal before Congress takes its August break.

Say what? A smaller deficit is bad because it’s “unraveling Republican plans”?

If you’re up for some intellectual heavy lifting, Corey Robin’s article in The Nation about the relationship between Nietzsche and the Austrian school of free-market economists (Hayek, Von Mises) is very illuminating.

I had never thought much about whether the economic concept of “value” is connected to the moral concept of “values”, or what the will-to-power has to do with economic power. But the connections are fascinating.

Christian parents of 6th-graders who attend a public school in Arkansas are canceling the official class graduation ceremony (and holding an unofficial one in a church) because they’ve been informed that they can’t do what they did last year: open and close the ceremony with prayer.

In a classic example of privileged distress, the parents have managed to turn things around so that they are the persecuted ones. They’re not being exclusive; they’ve invited everyone to their Christian graduation ceremony. Says one parent: “We’re not trying to be pushy or ugly to anybody, we just want them to know there is a God who loves them. … We just want to take a stand for God because we felt like our rights were taken away.”

To everyone else, it’s obvious that the “right … taken away” from the Arkansas Christian parents is actually a special privilege that no other religious group in America has ever had: the option to insert their religious messages into government-sponsored programs. (I’m sure a lot of Buddhists and atheists also have some uplifting thought that they “just want people to know” and would like the government to provide a platform for.) American Christians are privileged, not persecuted; but their privileges are shrinking, so it feels like persecution to them.

I started with one sermon, so I’ll end with another one: Astronauts explain “the Overview Effect“, the way your point of view changes after you’ve seen the Big Blue Ball from space.

Our political polarization and dysfunctional public debate is largely driven by convictions and worldviews immune to contrary evidence and expertise.

— Tom Allen, Dangerous Convictions (2013)

This week everybody was talking about the Tsarnaev brothers, Chechens, and Muslims

One measure of prejudice is how easily an individual can be reduced to a group stereotype, so that he shares the collective guilt of his people and passes his guilt on to them.

I’m old enough to remember the 1980s, when the Irish Republican Army was one of the most feared terrorist groups on the planet. (An engineering conference I attended in Brighton was originally slated for the Grand Hotel before the IRA blew it up. You can get the flavor of the times by watching the classic 1980 film “The Long Good Friday” in which an English gangster learns that the ordinary rules of gang war don’t apply when you cross the IRA.)

Know what I don’t remember? Public discussions about whether the Irish are terrorists by nature or Catholicism is a religion of violence. (I’d love to hear Irish Catholic Bill O’Reilly respond to those questions.) That’s the measure of our prejudice against Muslims and Chechens, or perhaps of the privilege our society accords Catholics and the Irish.

In fact, many of the loudest Islamophobic politicians today winked and nodded at IRA fund-raising in the US then. Anti-Muslim Congressman Peter King went even further, speaking at a pro-IRA rally in 1982.

Right-wing Christians have committed acts of terror in the US, such as the assassination of Dr. George Tiller in Kansas. (I call this terror rather than just murder, because the point wasn’t merely to kill Tiller, but to intimidate any doctor who might think about replacing him.) Tiller’s murderer is revered as a hero by the Army of God. If they were the only Christian group you ever read about in the newspapers, what would you think of Christianity?

The measure of Christian privilege in America is that Christians and Christian churches don’t have to comment on such crimes unless they want to. But the Cambridge mosque the Tsarnaev brothers had a tangential connection with did feel obligated to issue a denunciation of the bombing. Even so, no matter how often such denunciations happen, American Islamophobes won’t hear them and will claim Muslims “remain silent“.

As a native-born white American male, I never have to worry that somebody might hold Adam Lanza or Jared Loughner or Don Blankenship against me, or wonder why I haven’t denounced their crimes loudly enough. That’s the measure of my privilege: Unlike Muslims or Chechens, I have the right to be judged as an individual; I can’t be reduced to the stereotype of my group.

Interesting finding from sociologist Robert Putnam (of Bowling Alone fame): Religious beliefs are not correlated with public-spirited virtues like generosity, but commitments to a religious community are. The people to worry about are not the members of the Islamic Society of Boston, but the intensely committed believers (of any faith) who are unsocialized by a church, synagogue, mosque, or whatever institution draws people of that faith together.

John Cassidy imagines how the public discussion would be different if the Tsarnaevs had used assault rifles rather than bombs.

which led to a discussion of conspiracy theories

many of which have been inspired by the Boston bombing.

Rachel Maddow did a great piece about the mainstreaming of right-wing conspiracy theories. Stuff that responsible conservative leaders would have ostracized a generation ago (as William F. Buckley and Barry Goldwater ostracized the John Birch Society in the 1960s) is now getting the hearing it doesn’t deserve. What used to be “crazy” is becoming merely “controversial”.

Steve Benen points out:

This just doesn’t happen on the left. This is not to say there aren’t wacky left-wing conspiracy theorists — there are, and some of them send me strange emails — but we just don’t see prominent, center-left media professionals trumpet such silliness or Democratic members of Congress racing to take the nonsense seriously.

It’s hard to know what to do with crazy theories like Boston-was-a-false-flag-operation or Obama-protected-the-Saudi-bomber. Arguing against them in some way validates that they’re worth arguing about — that the theory is controversial, not crazy. As you undoubtedly know if you have a friend who sends you such stuff, it’s easy to get sucked into the details of bizarre theories, and the conspiracy theorists love it when you do. Whatever psychological need conspiracy theories fill, nothing scratches that itch better than arguing obscure details with a doubter.

Conspiracy theories attract because they make life more interesting; they let the theorist be an insider, superior to the sheep who accept conventional views; they simplify the bewildering complexity of events and are strangely reassuring — better to believe the world is controlled by an evil conspiracy than face the fact that it’s out of control altogether.

So when Uncle Dave sends you that link to some talking-head “proving” something ridiculous, your response (if any) should be boring and not provide any opportunity for him to demonstrate his superior knowledge. Here’s what I suggest: Return a link to this video of a talking head making sense about conspiracy theories in general.

Send the same link every time: This is my response. I’m going to keep giving the same answer as long as you keep making the same mistake, no matter how many different ways you make it.

Make sure he realizes you wasted no time at all figuring out how to address the unique issues raised by this particular theory. Be repetitive. Be boring. Don’t scratch the itch.

But I wrote about the dysfunctionality of Congress

Or rather, former Maine Congressman Tom Allen did, and I reviewed his book.

We also heard a lot about the George W. Bush legacy

The new Bush Library opened in Dallas Thursday. And so began a predictable attempt by conservatives to whitewash the memory of one of the worst presidents of all time.

I don’t have to list and refute all their arguments, because Alex Seitz-Wald already did on Salon. And wruckusgroink on Daily Kos asked the right question: What if (instead of all the incompetent and evil things he did), President Bush had done nothing? What if he had just put the government on cruise control with the peace-and-prosperity policies Clinton had in place? “All Bush had to do was NOTHING to have a successful presidency.”

On the idea that historians will eventually give President Bush more credit (as they have Truman and to a lesser extent LBJ and Nixon), I stand by what I wrote as Bush was leaving office:

What happens when historians re-evaluate a president? Picture the events of a presidency as weights on a two-pan scale: a success pan and a failure pan. Even with the advantage of hindsight, an event seldom jumps from one pan to the other. Bad things stay bad; good things stay good. All that changes is our estimate of how much the events weigh.

… Now picture future historians re-assessing W. The weights may grow or shrink, but they’re not going to jump from one pan to the other. Nobody’s going to conclude that, in retrospect, Bush handled Hurricane Katrina well, or that he really did capture Bin Laden. Ignoring terrorism until 9/11 and turning a $200-billion surplus into a $1.2 trillion deficit are never going to seem like deft moves. The lies he told to start the Iraq War will not to stand to his credit, no matter what awaits in Baghdad’s unforeseeable future. Torture and illegal wiretaps are always going to stain Bush’s record, just as the Japanese internment stains FDR’s and the Palmer raids stain Wilson’s.

That’s the failure pan. So what NATOs, Marshall Plans, Berlin Airlifts, China breakthroughs, or Voting Rights Acts sit in Bush’s success pan? What accomplishments can future historians re-weigh to shift the balance in his favor?

I don’t see any likely candidates. That’s why I expect Bush to wind up more like Herbert Hoover than Harry Truman.

So far, that prediction is holding up. But I will admit to being surprised by this: The post-Bush Republican Party has gone so far off the deep end that W doesn’t seem nearly as radical as he did at the time.

In other Bush-related news, the Constitution Project’s bipartisan report on detainee treatment after 9-11 came out. “The most important  or notable finding of this panel is that it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture.”

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Having spent the last several years watching the final decline of both of my parents, I can testify that this is a very important article: If this was a pill, you’d do anything to get it by Ezra Klein.

An experimental Medicare program in Pennsylvania does something radically low-tech: It identifies old people with chronic illnesses and sends a nurse to visit them once a week. The nurse answers questions, straightens out confusions about medications, notices if the patient suddenly looks worse, and so forth. The goal is to catch problems before they require hospitalization, because spending time in the hospital is bad for chronically ill old people. The program’s architect says:

Being in the hospital for three days or five days sets them back to a point where they’ll never regain what they were. That’s where the scales tip. That’s where people end up needing a nursing home.

Turns out, the program works, as proved by randomized trials over more than a dozen years. The patients are healthier, stay out of the hospital, and so cost less for Medicare to cover — even after paying the nurse. If you’ve spent any time with chronically ill people in their 80s, none of this should surprise you.

So is Medicare taking the program national? No, they’re shutting it down in June. Says one expert:

There is a bias in medicine against talking to people and for cutting, scanning and chopping into them. If this was a pill or or a machine with these results it would be front-page news in the Wall Street Journal.

The Daily Show’s John Oliver was at his best in this segment, in which he compares the Australian politicians willing to implement gun control even at the cost of their careers to American politicians whose definition of “success” fails to mention the public good.

“Never again,” he says, “will a political career end in a senseless act of meaningful legislation.”

BP lied twice about the 2010 Gulf of Mexico spill: It claimed the spill was about 1/10th of its actual size, and it told the clean-up workers that the dispersant they were exposed to was safe. Now we have the safety manual they were supposed to distribute, but didn’t.

The NYT Magazine’s “Our Feel-Good War on Breast Cancer” points out an inconvenient truth: Raising “awareness” isn’t actually moving us any closer to a cure.

Poor Todd Akin has had to relive his “legitimate rape” comment over and over again. It must be tough to have such a traumatic experience and then wonder for the rest of your life if you might have avoided it somehow. If only our society had more compassion for people who suffer through things like that.

In addition to Afghanistan and Iraq, President Obama may be winding down another war: the war on drugs. “While law enforcement will always play a vital role in protecting our communities from drug-related crime and violence, we simply cannot incarcerate our way out of the drug problem.”

The White House report calls for prevention through education. Let’s hope that means accurate education, rather than the anti-drug propaganda I remember from high school. Here’s what I learned from my high school drug programs: Adults would spout any kind of BS to get me to do what they wanted. That lesson stuck with me.

The Oscar-winning documentary Inside Job (about Wall Street’s role in creating the housing bubble that started the Great Recession) is available for free on YouTube. In HD, no less. Based on Charles Ferguson’s outstanding book Predator Nation, narrated by Matt Damon, free on your computer right now — what’s not to like?

The Bangladesh disaster and follow-up on the Texas factory explosion will have to wait until next week.

I like to pay taxes. With them I buy civilization.— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

This week everybody was talking about Margaret Thatcher’s life and death

The Iron Lady hasn’t been prime minister since 1990, so you might think the old wounds would have scabbed over by now. Apparently not. After Thatcher’s death was announced, “Ding-Dong the Witch is Dead” went to #1 on iTunes-UK. Not to defend her, but do I have to point out how sexist that is? If she were male, maybe opponents could be satisfied with Elvis Costello’s “Tramp the Dirt Down“.

When her death was falsely reported in 2008 and plans for a 3-million-pound state funeral came out, Scottish comedian Frankie Boyle commented:

For 3 million, they could give everyone in Scotland a shovel, and we would dig a hole so deep that we could hand her over to Satan personally.

To put her impact in American terms, Thatcher was the anti-FDR. By the time she left office, the union-dominated Britain of the 1970s was as hard to remember as the Roaring Twenties were when Roosevelt died in office in 1945.

She inspired the Reagan Revolution in the US, and symbolized the plutocratic and plutolatric trends that today make the US and the UK (plus Italy, for some reason) the rich countries with the greatest inequality and the least economic mobility.

I guess that’s hard to forget.

and taxes

It’s April 15, time for my annual attempt to popularize the term work penalty — the extra tax you pay because you work for a living rather than having money that works for you: How Big Was Your Work Penalty in 2012?

Of course, we can’t tax wealthy heirs, and we can’t tax their dividend or capital gain income because … well, just because. They’re “job creators” or something. There’s a word for this, plutolatry. It usually means “worship of wealth”, but it could also mean “worship of the rich”. I’m looking for ways to work it into conversations, like I did in the previous section.

Another Tax Day point worth making: Americans would save a lot of time and money if the IRS would use the information it has and just mail us a bill. If your tax situation was simple, you could pay the bill and be done with it, but if you wanted to itemize or claim some complicated tax break, you could file a return the way you do now.

Why doesn’t that happen? Two reasons: The tax-prep industry makes money from the current arrangement, so they lobby Congress to keep things the way they are. And anti-tax conservatives want Tax Day to be painful so that the public will resent paying taxes.

and Obama’s budget

which included a proposal to figure the cost-of-living adjustments to Social Security using the stingier chained CPI. I discuss this in Four Things I Know About Social Security. #3 is “Chained CPI is a way to cut Social Security benefits, not a way to measure inflation more accurately.”

and (oddly) a C&W song

For some reason I haven’t fathomed, this week all sorts of people were moved to comment on Brad Paisley’s new song  “Accidental Racist” (performed with black rapper L L Cool J). The song has a why-can’t-we-all-just-get-along theme, but annoys blacks and liberals by (among other things) making a false equivalence between whites judging a black man by his gold-chain bling and blacks not forgiving whites for the iron chains their ancestors wore.

In my terminology, Paisley is expressing privileged distress: His song’s main character (never assume a song is autobiographical) suffers because blacks now feel empowered enough to object to racist crap (like a confederate-flag t-shirt) that he used to get away with. He then imagines that his suffering is comparable to what blacks suffer from racism, so he’s ready to call it even and wipe the slate clean.

The debate basically amounts to: Yeah, the song raises the race issue in a pretty clueless way, but if it were any more clueful, Paisley’s fans wouldn’t listen to it and so wouldn’t be thinking about overcoming racism at all. Half a loaf.

While we’re on the subject of racial cluelessness, Rand Paul spoke at historically black Howard University. Paul treated the Republican Party’s dismal performance among black voters as some of kind of mystery. He reviewed the party’s stellar racial record from Lincoln through the 1950s, and then skipped completely over the last 50 years, when Republicans courted the racist Dixiecrats who were leaving the Democratic Party after it embraced the Civil Rights movement. (Charles Blow filled in that history for Paul. I reviewed it in detail in December.)

Jon Stewart summarized:

You can’t just yada yada yada the last 60 Republican years: “A Republican freed the slaves, gave black people the vote, yada yada yada, and now all blacks vote Democratic. I mean, what the hell?”

Josh Marshall commented on Paul’s shock that his audience already knew the history he was trying to tell them and still wasn’t sold:

When you look at who’s the bamboozled and who’s the bamboozler in this part of the GOP subculture you see that it’s not so clear cut. … The GOP is so deep into its own self-justifying racial alternative reality that there’s some genuine surprise when the claptrap doesn’t survive first contact with actual black people.

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An unplanned consequence of putting armed police in public schools: Incidents that used to send you to the principal’s office now send you to court. The NYT reports:

Joshua, a ninth grader who lives south of Houston, got into a brief fight on a school bus in November after another boy, a security video showed, hit him first. The principal called in the school’s resident sheriff, who wrote them both up for disorderly conduct.

Charges were eventually dismissed, but Joshua had to find a lawyer and miss class for two court appearances. “I thought it was stupid,” he said.

Harvard’s Jal Mehta proposes a really radical change in education policy: Train teachers rigorously and well, and then let them do what they’re paid to do.

Show this to the next person who tells you about “liberal media bias” on climate change.

Number of climate scientists participating in discussion: zero.

Exxon’s pipeline spill in Arkansas is much smaller and less messy than a Keystone XL spill would be. Imagine this in your back yard.

Yet another sad story about a teen rape victim getting hounded by her peers.

You’ve got to wonder if this is finally the right place for a “Just Say No” approach. As we saw in the Steubenville case, a lot of teen guys seem not to realize (at least not until after the fact) that it’s wrong to take advantage of a girl who can’t resist. That’s why I like this video: