Survival strategies of Governmentus Omnipotus
Government, an aggressive and complex multicellular organism, can be found in nearly every region and climate of the planet, including those such as North America where the natural habitat is often inhospitable. In order to thrive in such climates, government has evolved a variety of sophisticated survival strategies. These have enabled it to co-exist with, and often out-compete, other species.
A full examination of these strategies falls beyond the scope of this paper, but a brief summary should suffice to acquaint the lay reader with the more salient ones.
Learned Predator Recognition. Government in the United States has several highly sophisticated means, from satellite surveillance to warrantless wiretapping, to scrutinize its environment for potential threats, both external and internal. The Nixon administration maintained an enemies list. The administration of President Barack Obama developed an “attack watch” website, and its Department of Homeland Security identified veterans returning from Iraq as potential terrorists. And, like the FBI under President Bush, the Justice Department under Obama trolled through the phone logs of national reporters, seeking out potential weaknesses.
Hypertrophy. Size alone confers distinct advantages in the competition for resources and the battle for survival. It is not surprising, therefore, that government grows at a remarkable rate. Consider public education: In 2009, the cost of a K-12 education, per student, exceeded $151,000 – almost three times the amount, after adjusting for inflation, spent per student in 1970. The story is the same for social-welfare spending, which has increased 375 percent in constant dollars since 1965. Even the most fearsome apex predators often are daunted by the prospect of confronting such powerful creatures.
Metastasis.Many government operations are able to permeate the bureaucratic lining and spread to other agencies. The federal government alone operates 33 distinct housing-assistance programs across four different agencies, and 49 job-training programs across eight different agencies. This strategy helps ensure that even if one strain of programs dies off, many others will remain.
Alleopathy.In the competition for finite resources, government has developed various means of inhibiting other organisms. Public school systems have become adept at fending off school-choice proposals, for instance. The Internal Revenue Service also has been used as a weapon. The earliest known occurrence of this in the wild was recorded during the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. President Nixon highly favored this tactic as well. More recently, the Obama administration has targeted tea-party groups and other organizations that “criticized the government and sought to educate Americans about the U.S. Constitution,” according to published accounts.
Crypsis.The simplest way to evade attack is to avoid being detected. Government therefore has several means of remaining unnoticed – principal among them taxpayer withholding. Through withholding, the government is able to feed its voracious appetite without, in many cases, the host organism’s knowledge or awareness.
Thanatosis. Many creatures, including the possum and the hog-nosed snake, feign death to avoid predation. This behavior has been observed in government as well. Programs thought to have been killed off only to spring back to life at a later date include the WWII-era mohair subsidy and the even older federal helium program, originally created to ensure a supply of helium for WWI-era dirigibles. In 2013, The Washington Post reported that the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to continue its operations.
Symbiosis. In many cases government programs have developed mutually beneficial relationships with other organisms that help them to ward off attack. Military systems are particularly adept at this survival technique. The F-22 Raptor program involves more than 1,000 contracting companies in 46 states. Military systems have even developed defenses against attacks from other government colonies. In 2010 the U.S. Army conducted a review of MEADS, the Medium Extended Air Defense System, which found it ill-suited to current defense needs. “Current Army position is: Terminate MEADS,” the Army wrote. Yet according to a 2013 issue of Government Executive, MEADS “is continuing to receive hundreds of millions of dollars in government funding.”
Invasiveness. Constantly seeking out new territory and food sources, government is among the most aggressive of all invasive species. Anti-poverty programs, once designed to ease the plight of the poor, now routinely seek out applicants with incomes of two to four times the federal poverty level. The Affordable Care Act, passed by Congress in 2010, conferred on government the unprecedented power to force Americans to purchase a commercial good independent of any consumer behavior. The U.S. Department of Agriculture proclaims as its goal to “increase participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.” To that end it has adopted a variety of strategies, including a partnership with the Mexican government through which Mexican consulates spread the word that resident aliens can apply for U.S. food stamps without having to answer questions about their immigration status. And in 2013, The Washington Post reported on the experience of federal employee Dillie Nerios in Florida: “It is Nerios’s job to enroll at least 150 seniors for food stamps each month, a quota she usually exceeds.”
CONCLUSION: While a certain amount of government is necessary for the health of any ecosystem, too much can prove devastating. It is important, therefore, to actively monitor and limit government lest it threaten Nature’s delicate balance. However, government’s aggressiveness and highly developed survival mechanisms will make this an arduous task for the foreseeable future.
What Happened to “Reasonable,” “Common-Sense” Limits on the Bill of Rights?
Reporters for the AP are outraged that the government has spied on them. This despite the fact that Attorney General Eric Holder says the ostensible reason for the spying, a leak of sensitive information,
was one of the “top two or three” leaks he has ever seen, claiming it put the American people at risk.
“That is not hyperbole. It put the American people at risk,” Holder said, emphasizing his earlier comments.
Cognitive Dissonance on Guns
In political debates, it seems fair to say most of us think we operate as follows: First, we study the issues. Second, we reach conclusions based on the best arguments and evidence. Then we seek out those who share our conclusions and the reasons for them. Finally, we make common cause with the like-minded.
Unfortunately, research suggests people often do precisely the opposite. To a much greater degree than we would like to think, we choose up sides first. Then we align our conclusions with what our side thinks about a particular issue. Then we adopt the arguments that best support the conclusions our side favors — even if we dispute those same arguments in other cases.
If you’d like an example, take the current debate about guns.
Since the heinous tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., last year, liberals across the country have waged an intense and sustained campaign for tighter gun control. One of the arguments they are currently deploying is historical. Zachary Elkins, a professor at the University of Texas, put it this way a few days ago: “The Second Amendment seemed almost irrelevant for most of our history. In the 19th and 20th centuries, many American towns and states regulated guns… . But in the 1980s, a movement to interpret the amendment as promoting the right to bear arms for self-defense emerged.”
Writing in The New Yorker roughly a year ago, Harvard’s Jill Lepore made a similar argument: “In the nineteen-seventies, the N.R.A. began advancing the argument that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual’s right to carry a gun.” She explains this as part of a broader conservative political strategy: “Describing gun-safety legislation as an attack on a constitutional right gave conservatives a power at the polls that, at the time, the movement lacked.”
This “novel interpretation” of the Second Amendment, as it has been called, finally prevailed at the Supreme Court in 2008 in the Heller case, and again two years later in McDonald. Those rulings thoroughly outraged most liberals, which is remarkably strange — because they were precisely the sort of rulings liberals have long celebrated.
In cases from Griswold (privacy) to Miranda (criminal law) to Roe (abortion) to Lawrence (sexual liberty) to Hollingsworth and Windsor (today’s gay-marriage disputes), progressives consistently (and correctly) have advocated an expansive reading of the Constitution — one that recognizes new rights even where doing so might seem a bit of a stretch.
The Constitution does not explicitly mention a right to privacy, for instance. But in Griswold the Supreme Court discerned one in the “penumbras” and “emanations” of other constitutional rights. And liberals think that is splendid, since — they say — the Constitution is a living document that ought to grow and change with the times.
As Lepore notes in her New Yorker piece, “Gun-rights arguments have their origins … in twentieth-century liberalism” and the “rights revolution” of the 1960s. Yet generally speaking, liberals disdain the right to own firearms — despite the fact that it receives explicit mention in the Constitution. So they are now doing something unprecedented: advocating that a constitutional right be curtailed, and perhaps even revoked.
Conservatives are shifting tactics, too. Generally speaking, those on the right have little patience for the view of the Constitution as a living, organic thing that confers new rights as times change. They harbor little affection for novel constitutional theories, scoffing at Roe’s reasoning and the notion of a constitutional right to gay marriage. They read the Constitution narrowly — except when it comes to the Second Amendment. In that instance they have, correctly, embraced the new and more expansive reading of Heller and McDonald.
The two sides are trading playbooks in other ways as well. For instance, liberals now frequently invoke common sense — as in, “common-sense gun-control measures,” which supposedly stand in contrast to extreme, rights-based resistance to measures meant for the protection of public safety. This is precisely the argument conservatives long made against the exclusionary rule — which prohibits using evidence against a criminal defendant if it has been improperly obtained.
To law-and-order conservatives, letting a murderer get off on a “legal technicality” so he can kill more innocent people is not faithful adherence to constitutional law — it is a ridiculous violation of common sense. Likewise, after 9/11 conservatives argued that both common sense and the common good demanded adopting stern anti-terrorism measures, from warrantless wiretapping to indefinite detention. Saving innocent lives from crazed mass murderers, most conservatives said, was far more important than silly constitutional abstractions. This is precisely the same argument liberals are making now about guns.
Such team-sports fealty ends in absurdity. To conservatives, the federal government’s potential for domestic tyranny justifies armed resistance — but that same government can do no wrong in the war on terror. To liberals, the same government that is a half-step away from fascism in the war on terror is our benevolent guardian against domestic firearms.
Maybe they’re both half right.
Bingo.
(Source: ronpaulproblems, via wherelibertydwells)
With Friends Like Dianne Feinstein, the Constitution Needs No Enemies
Yesterday Dianne Feinstein hotly defended herself against Ted Cruz’s accusation that her push for gun control betrays a lack of constitutional scruples. As she said (not that you haven’t heard it by now):
I’m not a sixth-grader. I’m not a lawyer, but after 20 years, I’ve been up close and personal to the Constitution. I have great respect for it. … It’s fine you want to lecture me on the Constitution. I appreciate it. Just know I’ve been here for a long time. I’ve passed on a number of bills. I’ve studied the Constitution myself. I am reasonably well-educated, and I thank you for the lecture.
She has “great respect” for the constitution? Sure she does! After all, she’s studied it, too.
Being such a big fan of the Constitution must explain why she was one of the original sponsors of legislation extending the PATRIOT Act.
(If you need a refresher on all that’s constitutionally dubious about the PATRIOT Act, go here.)
And why she joined with the GOP and sponsored legislation extending warrantless wiretaps.
And why she argued that the government should not disclose any abuses of that program, since doing so might compromise future warrantless wiretapping (“This is an effort to make that material public, and I think it’s a mistake at this particular time because it will chill the program… “)
Oh, and why she sponsored legislation that would have let Congress prohibit flag desecration.
She’s such a big fan of the Constitution she has even spoken in favor of an “outright ban” on all firearms.
But hey, don’t go criticizing her for insufficient fidelity to the Constitution.
Because she’s “studied it.”
Herself.
I Was a Rand Paul Fan Before It Was Cool
I’m happy today to welcome all the new fans who made #StandWithRand a number one topic on Twitter last night. And let’s hope they all stick around, and keep trying to rein in the president’s authority to incarcerate and even assassinate American citizens on American soil.
Clever Hans vs. the Fourth Amendment
Julian Sanchez:
In the early 1900s, the German public was fascinated by a mathematical Mr. Ed named Clever Hans, an Orlov Trotter horse that seemed to be capable of counting, doing basic arithmetic, and even solving elementary word problems—which, lacking the dexterity to grasp a number two pencil, it would answer by stamping its hooves. Eventually, of course, it was proven that Hans was doing nothing of the sort: the horse was perceptive rather than clever, and had been picking up on subtle, subconscious cues from his handler that let him know when to begin stamping and when (having arrived at the correct answer) he should stop.
A century later, academic researchers have shown that even well-trained drug-sniffing dogs are subject to the “Clever Hans Effect,” often alerting to non-existent drugs or explosives in locations where their human handlers have been falsely told they were present. Nor are those findings strictly academic. A recent analysis by reporters at the Chicago Tribune found that field records showed that drug-sniffing dogs produced a disturbingly high level of false positives: in only 44 percent of cases where dogs alerted did a subsequent search turn up contraband. Their success rate was even lower when it came to certain minorities: when dogs alerted on a Hispanic driver, only 27 percent of ensuing searches found any drugs, suggesting that the pooches may be picking up on their handlers’ subconscious bias, effectively legitimizing a form of racial profiling.
All this should make the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision today in Florida v. Harris disappointing to anyone who cares about the Fourth Amendment right to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures. Overturning a ruling by the Florida Supreme Court, the decision holds that a well-trained drug dog’s alert during a traffic stop generally provides probable cause for a warrantless search of the vehicle—even though, as in this case, the dog repeatedly alerted at a car that turned out not to contain any of the chemicals it had been trained to detect. Urging the need for a “flexible” standard, the Court saw no need for police to maintain or provide any record of a dog’s reliability in the field—such as a count of false positives—and even suggested that apparent “false positives” might not be errors at all, since a dog might be picking up “residual odors” from drugs that had previously been in contact with the vehicle. Even if that’s true, however, it’s not clear why it cuts in the government’s direction here: if the dogs are that sensitive, it seems like an additional reason to doubt that an alert provides probable cause to believe contraband is currently present… .
Obama in 2004: It’s unconstitutional to arrest American citizens without due process…
But now, killing them without due process is not even subject to congressional oversight.
Dick Cheney must be so proud.
![Land of the Free?
If you live or are found within 100 miles of the U.S. border, your electronics may be seized and your data searched.
That covers most of the major population centers of the United States:
That’s 197.4 million people, including everyone in Hawaii. And Florida, Rhode Island, Maryland, Connecticut, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire and Michigan.
But wait - it gets worse:
Regarding the 4th Amendment concerns, the DHS (in their superficial two page memo) declared that “We also conclude that imposing a requirement that officers have reasonable suspicion in order to conduct a border search of an electronic device would be operationally harmful without concomitant civil rights/civil liberties benefits.” … .
That conclusion quoted above [is] the entire breadth and depth of their analysis in justification of this policy. It is the legal equivalent of “because we said so.”
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. The more tightly you try to regulate the flow of people across the country’s borders, the more you will infringe on the liberties of the people inside those borders as well.
Consider the above a bit of Q.E.D.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/716b649383242e326c35f88878b06413/tumblr_mi0mrrZ48F1ql0cy5o1_400.gif)
Land of the Free?
If you live or are found within 100 miles of the U.S. border, your electronics may be seized and your data searched.
That covers most of the major population centers of the United States:
That’s 197.4 million people, including everyone in Hawaii. And Florida, Rhode Island, Maryland, Connecticut, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire and Michigan.
But wait - it gets worse:
Regarding the 4th Amendment concerns, the DHS (in their superficial two page memo) declared that “We also conclude that imposing a requirement that officers have reasonable suspicion in order to conduct a border search of an electronic device would be operationally harmful without concomitant civil rights/civil liberties benefits.” … .
That conclusion quoted above [is] the entire breadth and depth of their analysis in justification of this policy. It is the legal equivalent of “because we said so.”
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. The more tightly you try to regulate the flow of people across the country’s borders, the more you will infringe on the liberties of the people inside those borders as well.
Consider the above a bit of Q.E.D.
Doug WIlder, Nation's First Black Governor, on MLK Day and Black History
Excerpt:
It has been a difficult journey to make the Declaration’s pronouncement of universal birthright freedom for Americans a broader reality, but the people of this nation continue to push themselves to live up to Jefferson’s words.
Even when it is not easy … even when our loudest neighbors shout the forward thinking down … even when a Civil War had to be fought … even when Constitutional Amendments had to be passed … even when attorneys general and courts had to remove government officials from schoolhouse doors …
Even in those instances of difficulty, the Declaration’s words have pushed us as a nation to make our union more perfect — and as Americans, while it often takes longer than it should, we try move in the direction that the Declaration’s words point us.
Suffrage is no longer reserved for the landholding elite. We are expressly disallowed to own another human being. Women not only have the right to vote, but this state has seen two serve it in the United States Senate. As I noted earlier, I followed Jefferson as chief executive of Virginia after a vote of the people. And a man of African heritage was chosen twice by the citizens of this nation to follow Jefferson as the holder of the title, “president of the United States.”
So are we the globe’s perfect union? No. But I debate anyone to claim our progress as a nation is nonexistent, because that is not true.
Yet, I also defy those who think we can claim victory, and bask in a majestic 21st-century American self-actualization. That is just not the case. To do so would be nationally delusional.
You Can’t Say That Here - This Is the Nation’s Capital!
“As we read the Constitution,” Barney Frank once wrote, “the United States is a free-speech zone.”
Sadly, that sentiment is honored as much in the breach as it is in the observance. The Bush administration repeatedly tried to silence dissent, and many college campuses are positively Orwellian.
Now a Washington judge has barred a protester — from the entire District of Columbia. His purported offense: Climbing a tree during the inauguration:
James E. Felman, a Tampa defense attorney and co-chair of the American Bar Association’s sentencing committee, said that if the tree branch “is your public safety argument for the stay-out-of-town order, it is really dubious. If the tree branch is your argument, order him not to climb trees over the heads of people.”
