I recently went to the doctor for a routine visit. As I was leaving, she mentioned offhandedly that I shouldn't worry if I forget to take the calcium supplement she'd prescribed a few months earlier (and which I secretly forget to take almost every day). She alluded to "new studies" that indicate that calcium supplements not only might not help women keep their bones strong, but might hinder that process.

About a week ago, I read an article at an online health food magazine that told me that no knowledgeable, self-respecting nutritionist would ever eat rice cakes, which are routinely touted as a health-food staple but which are apparently terrible for you.

A few months back, I listened to a BBC Food Programme podcast in which it was asserted that lard -- yes, lard -- has gotten a bad rap. Not only is it much less likely than first believed to gum up your arteries and kill you, but it might actually be pretty good for you, if you don't eat it by the bucketful.

I give up.

At our house, a typical tableau involves me haranguing my kids not to drink yet another glass of Coke while my husband rolls his eyes. He believes no one really has a clue about these things and that in the absence of a medical condition everything is okay in moderation. I'm starting to wonder whether he's right.

Eggs were terrible for you until they weren't. Chocolate caused acne until it didn't. Jeanne Calment lived to 122, and she spent most of that time eating chocolate, drinking port, and alternately consuming and smearing herself with olive oil. That program seems as likely to succeed as anything endorsed by the NIH. I'd love to throw caution to the winds, but I've got three kids to raise and I'd like them to be healthy. I have no interest, however, in credulously following restrictive edicts until they are blithely overturned. What to do?

Recall that from the outset, after it was revealed that the IRS was targeting conservatives and conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status, IRS-apologists came out with the claim that the unwarranted scrutiny was the result of staffers in Ohio offices who went rogue.  As such, according to the apologists, we were not supposed to think that the agency as a whole was rotten to the core; just that there were a few isolated bad apples who in no way, shape, or form were representative of the IRS as a whole.

That theory never held much water to begin with. It holds even less water now: 

An IRS staffer in Cincinnati told congressional investigators that a Washington official was the driving force behind the targeting of Tea Party organizations in 2010, and showed unprecedented interest in those groups’ tax-exempt applications.

Elizabeth Hofacre, the Cincinnati staffer, said that she started receiving applications from Tea Party groups to sift through in April, 2010. Hofacre’s handling of those cases, she said, was highly influenced by Carter Hull, an IRS lawyer in Washington.

Hofacre said that she integrated questions from Hull into her follow-ups with Tea Party groups, and that Hull had to approve the letters seeking more information that she sent out to those organizations. That process, she said, was both unusual and “demeaning.”

“One of the criteria is to work independently and do research and make decisions based on your experience and education,” Hofacre said, according to transcripts reviewed by The Hill. “Whereas in this case, I had no autonomy at all through the process.”

“I thought it was over the top,” she added, in interviews held by investigators in both parties from the House Oversight and Ways and Means committees. “I am not sure where it came from, but it was a bit unusual.”

Hofacre, who oversaw Tea Party applications from April, 2010, to October, 2010, said Hull eventually became slow to endorse her letters. She eventually took another position within the IRS that year, after dealing with what she called “irate” applicants.

“And I see their point,” Hofacre said. “Even if a decision isn’t favorable, they deserve some kind of treatment and they deserve, you know, timeliness.”

The story goes on to state the following entirely unremarkable conclusion:

[t]he investigators’ interviews with Hofacre and another Cincinnati staffer, Gary Muthert, cast some doubt on statements from the former acting IRS commissioner, Steven Miller, and other agency officials that the targeting of Tea Party groups was limited to Cincinnati.

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The Limbaugh Theorem is Rush’s explanation of why, according to the polls, most Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction but don’t hold President Obama accountable for it. Even in the midst of scandals, his job approval rating remains relatively high. 

The theorem explains that people don’t associate Obama with the bad state of affairs because he’s always campaigning, fundraising, deflecting blame, feigning indignation, and talking about events in the Capitol as if he’s an outsider and not the man in charge. As a result, nothing sticks to him.

During his recent speech about terrorism at the National Defense University in Washington, Obama amazingly set himself in opposition to his own administration. He talked about a “perpetual war” that will prove to be “self-defeating, and alter our country in troubling ways,” as if he doesn’t have any control over the situation. He spoke about Guantanamo Bay, where “we are force-feeding detainees who are being held on a hunger strike.” But the “we” he mentioned doesn’t include himself. If he wanted to stop the force-feeding, he could do it with a simple phone call.

Clearly, Obama has portrayed himself as an uninvolved bystander, and low-information voters (who Rush says don’t know what’s going on outside of TMZ, SNL, and Entertainment Tonight) have fallen for it. They don’t fully understand the issues or how Washington works, so they believe Obama when he says he didn’t know about the IRS scandal until he read about it in the New York Times. They think it’s perfectly fine that the president was MIA when Americans were under attack in Benghazi. And they don’t think Obama should be held accountable for the Justice Department spying on the AP.

Rush is right. These factors certainly shed light on why people can approve of Obama’s job performance while at the same time believing the country is in decline. But not fully. Not everyone is a low-information voter, not everyone buys the campaign rhetoric, and many people will freely admit that Obama is deceptively positioning himself as if he’s above it all. Yet they still won’t hold him accountable.

There is an intransigent refusal on the part of most Americans to call Obama a failure, and the explanations given are not sufficient to explain this phenomenon. The Limbaugh Theorem is not complete. There’s another factor that needs to be added—a very powerful one, one more significant than Obama’s constant campaign strategy and the gullibility of the low-information voter.

It seems to me that the root cause of Americans not holding Obama responsible is the very same thing that got him elected: white guilt, something recognized not only by Rush after the 2008 election, but by writers and pundits from George Will to Ann Coulter.

“White guilt has produced mistake after mistake, including the 2008 election when more whites voted for Obama than voted for a Democrat for a decade,” Coulter said.

Lloyd Marcus, a writer at the American Thinker, agreed and pleaded with white Americans before the 2012 election “not to fall for the white-guilt thing ... again!”

Shelby Steele, in his book “White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era,” called white guilt “perhaps the greatest source of political, social and cultural power in the late twentieth century.”

[I] know [white guilt] to be something very specific: the vacuum of moral authority that comes from simply knowing that one's race is associated with racism. Whites (and American institutions) must acknowledge historical racism to show themselves redeemed of it, but once they acknowledge it they lose moral authority over everything having to do with race, equality, social justice, poverty, and so on. They step into a void of vulnerability. The authority they lose transfers to the “victims” of historical racism and becomes their great power in society. This is why white guilt is quite literally the same thing as black power.

The most striking irony of the age of white guilt is that racism suddenly became valuable to the people who had suffered it. Racism, in the age of racism, had only brought every variety of inhuman treatment, which is why the King generation felt that extinguishing it would bring equality. But in the age of white guilt, racism was also evidence of white wrongdoing and, therefore, evidence of white obligation to blacks.

If it is true that the primary causal factor in the Limbaugh Theorem is white guilt, then trying to pin anything on Obama by continually countering his campaign rhetoric or even trying to convince uninformed citizens that Obama, as the CEO and Commander-in-Chief, must be responsible for what goes on in Washington is useless. People, from low-information voters to high, just aren’t ready to abandon their guilt. They cling to it as a means of redemption, their perceptions informed by it, the truth shaded by it.

It’s time to accept the fact that when it comes to Obama, we won’t make a dent in America’s unwillingness or downright inability to accuse him of failure. Obama will never be held responsible because whites are lost in what Steele called “a void of vulnerability.”

Voters bound by white guilt have unwittingly forsaken any “moral authority” by which to judge Obama. He holds all the cards and carries all the power, not just because he is a clever man who avoids questions while on the campaign trail, or because people are ignorant, or even because he is a quintessential liberal adored by statists everywhere, but because he is, first and foremost, a “victim” of historical racism.

Given this fact, I believe it is futile to try to inform people that Obama is, indeed, responsible. Therefore, we should just stop talking about him. Marginalize him. Ignore him. Not that we give up the fight. Instead, we need to refocus it. Every time we’re tempted to say “Obama,” we need to insert “Democrats.”

The Democrats are responsible for the IRS scandal; the Democrats are behind the AP scandal; the Democrats left Americans to die in Benghazi; the Democrats are siphoning away our freedoms through the dreaded “Affordable” Care Act; the Democrats are responsible for inflation, failures in education, higher taxes, and unemployment.

Accusations of wrongdoing, of incompetence, of failure, will never stick to Obama. But they will stick to the Democrats. And let’s face it, they’re the ones we’ll be dealing with for years to come, not Barack Obama.

As the Los Angeles Times reports, the California Rehabilitation Center in Norco, California, is sponsoring a program called the Actors' Gang Prison Project. Under the program, prisoners not only learn the craft of acting but also "take part in what its organizers believed was a rehabilitation that would encourage them to express themselves and explore their emotions through acting exercises."

As the Times reports:

Tim Robbins, the actor and a co-founder of the Actors' Gang, played a beat on a set of drums to accompany the men as they performed. He said that these men — like the others who've participated in the program that began in 2006 — had gone through a noticeable transformation as they became more comfortable with performing and, really, more comfortable with themselves.

"You can really feel the weight of their incarceration," he said of when they first began. "There's a reluctance, a lack of lightness, a lack of the kind of spirit that does emerge."

This morning I looked at the data mining revelations in light of longer term trends in our government.  Here are excerpts:

So the morning papers are full of talk about the administration’s massive sweeping up and mining of communications data of all forms in the US.  The New York Times editorializes today that the Obama White House has “lost all credibility” on questions of domestic surveillance.   And the surveillance program does look might broad.  Who called whom on the phone; who emailed whom on the Internet: You communicated it, they got it.  But what to make of it?

My answer is, what did we expect?...

I generally supported the national security stance of George W. Bush’s administration.  But the former president and his colleagues showed insufficient appreciation for the danger – actually the likelihood — that those who followed them would misuse the powers they had assumed to meet the emergency.

The same can be said about liberals of past decades.  They brushed aside conservative warnings about the ever-increasing power that their domestic policies bestowed on their ever-expanding state.   The liberals of the 1950s through the 1980s saw no contradiction between the American Constitution’s commitment “to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity” and the social democratic state they nurtured.   We could have it all, they assured us.  Now a new kind of liberal is giving life to those earlier conservative fears.

Today we have a radical left administration that tramples separation of powers and reaches for government by decree.   How is stretching the meaning of the Patriot Act far beyond all conceivable Congressional intent different from what Mr. Obama has done with, for example, the clean air laws, stretching them to encompass greenhouse gases, an interpretation Congress has repeatedly and explicitly rejected?

And if we have reached the point at which such discrete and carefully drafted legislation can open wide the doors of abuse, what about the vast, loosely drafted acts that have become the administration’s signature – Dodd-Frank and, of course, Obamacare?

What I am saying is that you can’t have an ever expanding government with ever more arbitrary powers and not eventually have IRS and AP-type scandals, both signs of officials using the powers of government to their utmost, sweeping away all customary and, in cases, explicit restraints.

If liberals like the editorial writers of The New York Times wish to limit government in one sector, are they ready to limit it in the others?  If not, they may believe they are taking civil liberties seriously, but they aren’t.

How do you see this issue?

The American Revolution was in part fought over the English use of general warrants in the colonies. English officials were obtaining general warrants or writs of assistance that allowed them to search property or question persons without any probable cause supported by evidence that the particular person or property was involved in illegal activity. It seems that our government is employing what the Founders considered to be general warrants in the collection of information.

The Virginia Declaration of Rights of 1776 has this to say on the subject:

That general warrants, whereby an officer or messenger may be commanded to search suspected places without evidence of a fact committed, or to seize any person or persons not named, or whose offence is not particularly described and supported by evidence, are grievous and oppressive, and ought not to be granted.

The Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 has a similar statement:

Every subject has a right to be secure from all unreasonable searches, and seizures of his person, his houses, his papers, and all his possessions. All warrants, therefore, are contrary to this right, if the cause or foundation of them be not previously supported by oath or affirmation; and if the order in the warrant to a civil officer, to make search in suspected places, or to arrest one or more suspected persons, or to seize their property, be not accompanied with a special designation of the persons or objects of search, arrest, or seizure: and no warrant ought to be issued but in cases, and with the formalities, prescribed by the laws.

James Otis said that general warrants seemed to him to be "the worst instrument of arbitrary power, the most destructive of English liberty and the fundamental principles of law, that ever was found in an English law-book."

No need for a "special designation of the persons or objects of search" founded on "oath or affirmation" in our time; government doesn't have to specify what offense has been committed.

We are now at a point where most conservatives seem to think it is fine for government to collect call records and emails with no evidence at all that the information collected is connected to illicit activity. Apparently privacy rights and even the right to define the mystery of one's own existence don't cover emails and phone calls.

But don't worry--I am sure the same government that couldn't figure out Nidal Hasan was a threat when he openly preached the goodness of violence against Americans to his fellow officers will do a great job keeping us safe with the data they collect. The same intelligence agencies that failed to heed the warnings of the Russian FSB in regard to the Tsarnaev brothers will surely excel at managing the private information of hundreds of millions of Americans in the interest of national security.

The claim is that government is only collecting the data and not looking at information from American citizens without a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). Of course, the FISC is a secret court--hearings and records are closed to the public. But if you can't trust a secret court, who can you trust? After all, in 2012 the FISC court only approved 1,855 of 1,856 applications for warrants. Obviously only a nutty libertarian who wanted the terrorists to win would question this system.

I plan to stick with George Mason, John Adams, and James Otis over John Yoo, Jack Dunphy, and the Wall Street Journal.

Yesterday, I promised to provide some further thoughts on the Verizon data mining controversy. Since that pledge, we've also learned about internet surveillance as well, so let me address both points.

As I noted previously, the eavesdropping controversy will not prove as bad as it first seems. Apparently, the administration has been asking Verizon for all of the "metadata" on all of its customers' calling -- the phone numbers called and received, but not the content of the calls themselves.

In the days after the September 11, 2001 attacks, the Bush Administration's Justice Department (in which I served) approved a program that may have relied on similar technology, but was far narrower in scope.  Both programs, however, seek to use communications coming into the United States from a known terrorist abroad to identify an al Qaeda network within the country.
The program does not represent a violation of the Constitution because the Fourth Amendment does not protect dialed phone numbers (in contrast to the content of the communications). Individuals lose privacy over those numbers when they are given to the phone company. The Constitution protects the content of the communications -- whether it be a phone call, an email, or and old-fashioned letter.

Congress approved a change to the FISA statute to allow such collection, and a court of federal judges approved it. Analyzing such metadata -- what is sometimes called data mining -- is perhaps the most effective way to find terrorist cells in the U.S. and stop future attacks -- especially because the Obama Administration has dropped our best methods for producing  intelligence (the detention and interrogation of al Qaeda leaders).

The revelation of broad email surveillance is more troubling, simply because we don't know the program's scope. If the program only intercepts the content of emails for foreigners abroad, as is being reported, there is no constitutional violation. As the Supreme Court has made clear, the Fourth Amendment does not protect the communications of non-U.S. persons that take place abroad. In fact, the Justices reached that conclusion because they observed that it would be impossible for the U.S. to fight a war against a foreign enemy if limited by the Fourth Amendment. Allowing the government to intercept foreign, potentially enemy, signals intelligence without a warrant recognizes the reality of war, as opposed to the precise targeting of communications that would apply in the context of domestic law enforcement.

We shouldn't expect any measured response to the Obama administration's program from the usual libertarian critics, should we? When news broke in 2006 that the National Security Agency had been collecting phone call metadata, Senate Democrats called for President Bush's censure or perhaps impeachment. New York Times and Washington Post editorial writers attacked Bush as a violator of the Constitution. Academic leaders like Yale law school dean Harold Koh called it "quite shocking" and accused it of lacking judicial approval. Senator Patrick Leahy had a hearing where he yelled "are you telling me that tens of millions of Americans are involved with al Qaeda?"

I suspect that criticism of Obama from these sources won't rise to that level, proving yet again that the criticism of the Bush anti-terrorism programs was motivated by partisan politics, not enduring principle. Unfortunately, however, the program will be questioned because of the Obama Administration's serious mistakes on its IRS investigations into conservative groups and the Justice Department's surveillance of journalists. The Obama Administration's destruction of the American people's trust in government's ability to run its core functions will harm our government's ability to carry out its duty to protect the nation.

Anyone who knows Star Trek knows about medical tricorders, those gadgets that scan a person to find diseases, take readings, and detect abnormalities. Like many Star Trek gadgets—the most famous being the communicator/flip phone—it’s now becoming a reality.

Scanadu, a Silicon Valley-based company that makes medical technology devices, is using the crowd-funding website Indiegogo to bring its diagnostic device, Scout, to the market.

The gadget is expected to ship to home users in the spring of 2014, but Scanadu says that the Scout won't be considered a true medical device until it is approved by the FDA.

When the project first started, Scanadu’s cofounder, Walter De Brouwer, brought in old Star Trek props for study. Finally, they ended up with the Scout, which is notably updated from the old tricorder. It’s smaller and easier to hold in a single hand.

“It didn’t need to be so big,” De Brouwer told Wired. “Some of the functions were already taken over by one chip. Some of the color schemes were also a bit what you would expect, in the 60s and the 70s, to be the future. Well now we are living in that future, our color schemes are of course different.”

Another difference is you can see your data for yourself. In Star Trek, only Dr. Crusher or other scientists had access to the tricorder. With the Scout, you can see the data on your smartphone. And unlike the tricorder that was waved near the body, the Scout is placed against your forehead.

After about 10 seconds, information, such as heart rate, skin and body core temperature, hemoglobin saturation, blood pressure, and other data is displayed on your smartphone. One thing the Scout can’t detect are diseases—maybe that’ll eventually come with the upgrades.

Watching fictional gadgets come to life is exciting and fun. It’s happened before to one degree or another—talking computers (I still think of Hal when I hear a computer speak!), lasers, tractor beams, household robots, tablets, and smartphones. All had precursors in sci-fi.

I’m looking forward to the day when I can have my very own replicator. I’ll never be stuck in the kitchen again!

If you could make any sci-fi gadget a reality, which would it be?

Pivoting off our conversation yesterday, this sounds much more like a "mixed-sex" dorm story than a "gender-neutral" dorm story:

Several Middle Tennessee State University female students were filmed without their knowledge while showering in a campus dorm bathroom, a Tennessee news station reports.

Police have charged a 22-year-old senior at the university with 10 counts of unlawful photography and invasion of privacy for ”using his cellphone to record at least three freshman female students in the showers at Rutledge Hall – a coed dorm...

Read more on this story here.

Some conservatives are cheering on the federal government's collection of data on all Americans' phone calls, internet activity, credit card transactions, etc.

Wall Street Journal: Thank You for Data-Mining

Ace of Spades: Re-Thinking PRISM*

Andrew McCarthy/NRO: Phone Record Gathering Story Blown Out of Proportion

*To be fair, Ace isn't cheering on the data collection so much as saying that we should at least consider the benefits of having an all-knowing state in exchange for some uptick in security.

And I suppose there's no reason why conservatives who cheered on President Bush's expansion of the surveillance state should feel differently about it just because President Obama has further expanded it and given it some teeth. I'm much more weirded out by the liberals who screamed bloody murder at the Patriot Act who have suddenly gotten all comfortable with it under Obama.

But knowing that liberty-loving Americans are in short supply, I've decided to just join with the other side. Embrace Big Data and Big Brother and everything. Is there any reason we have to suspect that our federal government would ever do anything nefarious against its citizens? Anything at all?

In 2008, Ian Ayres wrote "Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart." It's about meta-data analysis. On page 34, he writes:

Imagine a world where people looked to the IRS as a source for useful information. The IRS could tell a small business that it might be spending too much on advertising or tell an individual that the average taxpayer in her income bracket gave more to charity or made a larger IRA contribution. Heck, the IRS could probably produce fairly accurate estimates about the probability that small businesses (or even marriages) would fail. In fact, I'm told that VISA already does predict the probability of divorce based on credit card purchases (so that it can make better predictions of default risk). (A little later on, we will take on whether all this Super Crunching is really a good idea. Just because it's possible to make accurate predictions about intimate matters doesn't mean that we should.) But I might at least want the option of having the government make predictions about various aspects of my life. Instead of thinking of the IRS as solely a taker, we might also think of it as an information provider. We could even change its name to the "Information & Revenue Service."

Don't you feel better? Wouldn't that be awesome to get the IRS engaged in some meta-data analysis? Why this meta-data doesn't just fight terrorist bombings in Boston (OK, bad example) but it can also tell you to get a divorce! And once we drop those barriers between agencies, the sky's the limit about what Big Data Brother can do for you.

Who else is on board?

So sayeth the UCLA Anderson Forecast. It is hard to disagree with its findings, which are written in admirably candid fashion:

The expected U.S. "Great Recovery" hasn't materialized and the economy has fallen short of even normal growth, according to a forecast released Wednesday.

The second-quarter UCLA Anderson Forecast said the growth of real gross domestic product - meaning the inflation-adjusted value of goods and services produced - is too small to help the nation climb out of its slump.

The figure was 15.4 percent below a "normal" growth trend, forecast director Edward Leamer wrote.

"To get back to that 3 percent trend, we would need 4 percent growth for 15 years, or 5 percent growth for eight years, or 6 percent growth for five years, not the disappointing twos and threes we have been racking up recently," he said.

"It's not a recovery. It's not even normal growth. It's bad," he wrote.

A real GDP growth rate of just 1.9 percent is expected for this year, only rising to 3 percent in 2015, according to the forecast.

[. . .]

Unemployment should fall to 6.9 percent next year and 6.6 percent by 2015, according to the forecast - partly due, however, to discouraged workers dropping out of the labor force.

Leamer said that while jobs are being created, "the tepid growth continues to obscure the nation's most fundamental problems: too much government spending funded with too much borrowing, too little national savings to cover late-in-life health care issues and too many workers lacking the skills to compete in the modern economy," according to a University of California, Los Angeles press statement.

In addition, the jobs being created may not provide workers with a secure future and the education system is failing to provide skills such as analytical thinking that will be crucial for future workers, he wrote.

"Regrettably we reward teachers if their students can regurgitate the information on standardized tests," Leamer wrote.

About the only good news contained in the report is that the housing market appears to be further recovering. But the rest of the news is bad, and the commentary on education policy failings is entirely apt. Recall that during his reelection campaign, President Obama told us that things were definitely looking up when it came to the economy. I wonder if he will be made to take back those words. Perhaps the national media, which is supposed to hold public officials to account, might want to get on the president's case regarding the rhetorical puffery he used to try to convince us that all is well with the economy.

In the meantime, James Pethokoukis admirably pushes back against the notion that we need to have a tighter Federal Reserve. I can't believe that this issue is actually being discussed. Inflation will be a threat down the line if we do not get fiscal policy under control, but it is not a threat now, or in the near future. And the economy could use all the help that it can get from an expansionary monetary policy.

It only grows, folks. In a story just released by the Washington Post, Barton Gellman and Laura Poitras write:

The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time.

The highly classified program, code-named PRISM, has not been disclosed publicly before. Its establishment in 2007 and six years of exponential growth took place beneath the surface of a roiling debate over the boundaries of surveillance and privacy. Even late last year, when critics of the foreign intelligence statute argued for changes, the only members of Congress who know about PRISM were bound by oaths of office to hold their tongues.

...

The technology companies, which participate knowingly in PRISM operations, include most of the dominant global players of Silicon Valley. They are listed on a roster that bears their logos in order of entry into the program: “Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.” PalTalk, although much smaller, has hosted significant traffic during the Arab Spring and in the ongoing Syrian civil war.

Dropbox , the cloud storage and synchronization service, is described as “coming soon.”

To Whom It Should Concern:

The attached photo, taken in your restaurant this morning, where I spent $10.99 on a "Little Smokies" breakfast, advertises that I can get a T-Bone Steak breakfast or dinner, including side item and beverage, for under $13. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for your showers which, I found out this morning, have risen to 13 bucks. For 13 bucks, I ought at least to get a baked potato with my shower, don't you think?  And a beverage, preferably something strong to take the edge off having to pay more money for the simple act of bathing than for consuming a T-Bone Steak.  

By the way, I noticed that my $13 shower came equipped with an already-chewed sunflower seed hull on the floor by the toilet, next to the used toothpick. You'd think that for that much money, I could get a few un-chewed sunflower seeds and a stack of individually wrapped toothpicks, like the ones by the cash register  in the restaurant.  

I also noticed that the mold that adorns the room, on the floor, throughout the shower, on the walls and around the mirror, hasn't been upgraded to reflect the superlative amenities of a premium-priced moldy shower. No, it's the same mold as before, a boring slimy green in color (though thoughtfully variegated around the toilet, next to the chewed sunflower seed hulls), and I appreciate the variety of course. If we aren't going to upgrade the quality of the mold, I ought to at least be given a Certificate of Inoculation printed for my next Department of Transportation Physical Exam, to prove that I am now immune to everything from polio to the plague and pestilence courtesy of your rather opulent facilities. After all, as the grime and sludge in your $13 shower demonstrates, sometimes quantity is quality.  

But I've gotten ahead of myself, which I tend to do when carried aloft on the general exuberance of having been mugged. I forgot to tell you about the adventure of even accessing the shower in the first place. As you know, if you ask the cashier, she needs must direct you to the kiosk where you tap the screen a few times to get to the proper menu and then deposit your money. The only problem was, the kiosk didn't want my $13. I thought, fleetingly, that the absurdity of the price had registered even with artificial intelligence, and that the machine had shut down on sheer principle.  But even the cashier, who was as kind and charming as the day is long, couldn't jam my money into the machine. So she rang it up at the register, which brings up another point. You need new machines. 

For 13 bucks, your little kiosk should speak kindly to me, in an accent of my choosing, take my dollar bills with no fuss, thank me, and then reach out with automated hands and give me a massage followed by a cigarette. Hell, for $13, hot towels should be offered by kindly young ladies who provide the same side items and beverages consumers of your cheaper-priced steaks receive. And for 13 bucks, you should answer a simple question from one who lives on the road: Are you on amphetamines? Are you aware that, while truckers must park at places that accommodate truck parking, we do have a few options left, the exercise of which will likely not help your bottom line?  

And speaking of options and bottom lines, if you wander into the men's room of your truck stops in the morning, as many families do while traveling, you will be greeted by the sight of truck drivers standing at the sinks, in various stages of undress, shaving kits on the counter, conducting personal hygiene.  I've noticed that this often times unsettles the children and serves further to underwrite the stereotype of truckers as animals.  Would you be kind enough to post signs notifying your customers that their wait time in the restroom may be increased as your shower prices have exceeded the cost of dining?  

Speaking of dining, your restaurants are starting to smell of body odor.  That's because we on the road, like you in your climate controlled office, operate on a thin profit margin.  Faced with the choice of eating and bathing, well,…you can't survive without food, right?   But at least we can brush our teeth.  In time, your customers might get used to being assaulted by the aroma of minty-fresh buttocks when they walk into your establishment, but I won't.  And neither will anyone that I can convince to take their business elsewhere, to avoid suffering the indignity of paying premium prices for facilities more suited to a hazmat team than the motoring public.

The evolving progressive state requires the constant creation of new language to describe itself. That's why a periodic vocabulary lesson is helpful.

Today's term is "mixed-sex dorm."

"Mixed sex" sounds a bit odd, and freaky, frankly. But it might be an improvement over the standard academic term for unisex digs--the emasculatory "gender neutral."

Let's be honest: If you were a college student today and had to choose, would you rather live in a "mixed-sex dorm" or "gender neutral dorm?"

I'll have a piece out soondiscussing the controversy over revelations that the Obama Administration has been collecting data on Verizon phone calls thanks to authorization via a FISA Court. My position is that the data collecting isn't unconstitutional because the Fourth Amendment only protects the content of phone calls and not information on the dialed numbers, length of the calls, etc.

The full piece is forthcoming, but you can get a deeper analysis of the issue through this 2007 article I published in the George Mason Law Review. I apologize for all of the footnotes, but there are a lot less than in a typical academic article. I promise.

The Nanny State has reached a whole new level online, and many of its websites are directed at our kids. They come from every government agency imaginable: ATF, CDC, FDA, FEMA, Housing and Urban Development, Social Security Administration, Federal Trade Commission, and even the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. (You can find a full list here.)

My favorite is Girls' Health, a website for girls aged 10 to 16. (There’s no Boys' Health, mind you. Only girls get their very own special website compliments of Big Gov.)

The website covers everything from the body, fitness, nutrition, drugs, relationships, bullying, the environment, and feelings.

I assumed these were already being taught in government schools where teachers can at least add a level of personal accountability, but the state doesn’t seem to be satisfied with leaving this kind of teaching to schools—or parents, where it ultimately belongs.

In the section called “Body,” Big Gov addresses issues like puberty, menstruation, sleep, general health, and, of course, sex and birth control. Here’s their advice to young girls about dating and sexual feelings:

Starting to date, thinking about romance, and feeling attraction all can be incredibly cool — and a little overwhelming. As you start thinking about love and sex, don’t forget to focus on feeling good about yourself. Take good care of your body. If you have questions, talk to your parent or guardian, doctor, or another trusted adult. And don’t do anything that makes you uncomfortable. You’ll probably remember these exciting days for many years to come, and you want to remember them happily!

As you start dating, think about what you’re looking for. A solid relationship starts with being with someone who supports you, trusts you, and appreciates you for who you really are. You want someone who deserves you!

From dating, the discussion, of course, turns to sex:

For teens, not having sex—abstinence—makes good sense. That’s partly because your chances of staying safe from unplanned pregnancy and HIV and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs) are better if you wait. It’s also partly because being older can help you handle the strong emotional aspects of sex. Just because your body seems ready doesn’t mean that you are!

When people say “sex,” they usually mean sexual intercourse, or a man putting his penis in a woman’s vagina. But even if you don’t have sex and are thinking about other types of sexual contact, like touching your partner’s genitals, you want to make sure you’re taking good care of yourself. These are very personal acts and are worth thinking about in a serious way. Also keep in mind that it is possible to get pregnant if a boy ejaculates (“comes”) on the outside of your vagina. And remember that you can get some STIs from oral sex or from genital-to-genital contact that isn’t intercourse. Above all, don’t do anything sexual that doesn’t feel right to you.

Wow, how did I make it through life without the government? That conversation I had with my mom on a sunny summer day in 1977 after I saw two lizards on top of each other sure seems inadequate! How did I make it through middle school without hearing from Big Gov that “it is possible to get pregnant if a boy ejaculates ('comes') on the outside of your vagina”?

Big Gov goes on to say, “You may get lots of messages about sex, everything from intense music lyrics to strict religious rules. Here’s what some young people are saying about waiting, staying safe, and respecting their bodies.” (So the government is lumping religion in with lyrics and urging girls to basically trust what other girls are saying. Now that makes sense!)

Of course, the messaging wouldn’t be complete without a discussion on birth control:

Anyone you’re seriously thinking about having sex with should be someone you can talk to about it. Talk about what kind of birth control you would use to protect yourselves from pregnancy and STIs. Talk about respecting each other’s feelings and not feeling pressured. It’s a good idea to talk about these things at a time and in a place where you’re comfortable and won’t be interrupted. And it’s a great idea to do this while your clothes are still on!

Some people feel like once they’ve had sex there’s no turning back. That’s not true. You don’t have to feel bad about yourself if you regret having sex. Everybody makes mistakes — that’s just part of learning. But it doesn’t make sense to keep doing something that feels wrong to you.

Finally, homosexuality is addressed:

If you’re having feelings of romantic or physical attraction to other girls, you may wonder about your sexual orientation. It’s natural as you develop to wonder about these feelings, and it may take time to figure out your sexual orientation. Also, having a gay or lesbian parent or sibling doesn’t mean you are gay.

If you’re feeling concerned about your sexual orientation, talk to someone you trust. Also, if you’re feeling stressed about telling others you’re gay or if you’re being bullied about being gay, you can get help. If you feel like you are going to hurt yourself, reach out right away to an adult, a friend you trust, or a counselor. Things can get better.

If you are going to have sex with another girl, keep in mind that women who have sex with women are at risk for many of the same STIs as women who have sex with men. Also, if you are a lesbian, it’s a good idea to talk to your doctor about protecting your overall health. Lesbians are more likely to have certain health problems, like obesity, smoking, and depression, so make sure you learn how to stay healthy and strong.

I’m sure there are some out there that say many girls don’t have parents they can talk to, that they need big government to step in and teach stuff like this. And yet, there have always been girls who didn’t have parents they could talk to. Who did they turn to? They learned from relatives, parents of friends, teachers, doctors, and, yes, even the church.

The point is that the government has no business instructing girls on these kinds of issues. It is devoid of a moral context and relational support. And it is just one more example of how big the government has gotten and how it has morphed into a living presence hell-bent on refashioning citizens in its own image.

Do you remember Nidal Hasan? The folks at Pravda-on-the-Hudson, Pravda-on-the-Potomac, CBS, ABC, NBC, and CNN would be just as happy if you had forgotten him, and the Obama Administration is even more eager to cram him down the memory hole than are the political operatives who pose as reporters and work at these news outlets. Unfortunately for them, however, Hasan is not cooperating.

If you remember, back in 2009, at a very inconvenient moment for the Obama Administration, an army major of that name, while shouting "Allahu Akbar," gunned down a slew of people at Fort Hood, wounding 32 Americans and killing an additional 13. In the interim, something like four years have passed, and Major Hasan is now, finally, coming to trial.

In the world of No-Drama Obama, however, such a man cannot be charged with a terrorist act. To do so would be to get in the way of a narrative still being shamelessly peddled by the Administration. The bombing of the Boston Marathon notwithstanding, the President asserted triumphantly a mere two weeks ago:

We ended the war in Iraq and brought nearly 150,000 troops home. We unequivocally banned torture, affirmed our commitment to civilian courts, worked to align our policies with the rule of law. … There have been no large-scale attacks on the United States, and our homeland is more secure.

So, to sustain this illusion, the US Army has resolutely ignored what Major Hasan said on the occasion of the attack, and it has charged him with, you guessed it, "workplace violence."

But, according to a report posted yesterday by The Christian Science Monitor, the major, who is conducting his own defense, insists that he acted on behalf of “the leadership of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the Taliban.” This is awkward in more ways than one. If Major Hasan was an enemy combatant or represented what is called in the law "an associated force," as he asserts, the victims of the shooting and the families of those whom he killed can claim combat compensation under the Military Commissions Act of 2006. If not, however -- if Major Hasan was merely a psychiatrist who went postal -- these long-suffering folks will be left out in the cold.

What a world we live in! A few years ago, we had a President with a zipper problem who wanted to quibble about the meaning of the word "is." Now we have an administration resolutely unwilling to call by its proper name what everyone with an ounce of sense recognizes as a terrorist act. This would be funny were it not so embarrassing.

Troy already posted on the revelation that Verizon is required by  FISA court order to turn over to the Obama Administration all data on all telephone calls made via their service. My husband joked that for the first time in his adult life he was happy to be an AT&T customer, but I think we all know that Verizon is not alone.

So this means that all of our phone call records are in the hands of the federal government, a notion straight out of the most dystopic fiction.

Member KC Mulville writes in the comments to the aforementioned post that the government is just collecting metadata. He says it's just public information and that the danger is only with what the government does with that data (other than identify you in about four seconds flat).

Benjamin Wittes over at Brookings picks up this point, trying to make sense of the FISA Court order that required Verizon Business Network Services, under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, to turn over all the goods.

He notes that the order began the day of the Boston bombings and will end in mid-July. He says he has a really hard time imagining the application that produced it. He writes:

To acquire such an order, the government does not have to do much—just as it doesn’t have to do much in a criminal investigation: It merely has to offer, in pertinent part, “a statement of facts showing that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the tangible things sought are relevant to an authorized investigation . . . to obtain foreign intelligence information not concerning a United States person or to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.”

So I’m trying to imagine what conceivable [set] of facts would render all telephony metadata generated in the United States “relevant” to an investigation, presumably of the bombing. This would include, of course, all telephony metadata that, as matters turned out, postdates the killing of one bomber and the capture of the other—though there’s no way the government could have known that when the application was submitted. And it would also include all telephony metadata that postdates the government’s conclusion that the Tsarnaev brothers were apparently not agents of any foreign terrorist group. But even if this were not the case, how is it possible that all calls to, say, Dominos Pizza in Peoria, Illinois or all calls over a three month period between two small businesses in Juno [sic], Alaska would be “relevant” to an investigation of events in Boston—even if we assume that the FBI did not know whom it was investigating in the Boston area and did not know whom that unknown person was communicating with?

I think the only possible answer to this question is that a dataset of this size could be “relevant” because there are ways of analyzing big datasets algorithmically to yield all kinds of interesting things—but only if the dataset is known to include all of the possibly-relevant material. The data may not be relevant, but the dataset is relevant because it is complete—and therefore is sure to include any communications by whomever the bombers turn out to be.

The trouble is that if that constitutes relevance for purposes of Section 215—or for purposes of grand jury subpoena, for that matter—then isn’t all data relevant to all investigations?

I'm not saying I'm completely surprised, although it is worth remembering how much of a bloody hypocrite Barack Obama is. But isn't this terrifying? Or are you in the "our all-powerful federal government, IRS included, would never do anything bad with data" camp?

We've talked here before about the Syrian crisis being a proxy battle between Iran and Saudi Arabia for regional supremacy. On the one side, we have Shiite Iran, aligned with its sole ally, the Alawite Syrian regime, and aided by its Lebanese enforcers, Hezbollah. On the other side, we have  the Sunni Saudis, aligned with Turkey and Qatar.

Viewed solely within this context, the stakes are very high indeed, since an Assad victory would constitute a victory for Iran. Where Iran might have been completely isolated in the region (with implications for the pressure that might have been brought to bear on her nuclear ambitions), Iran would be strengthened by an Assad win. Iran and Hezbollah would be emboldened rather than weakened. To use Lee Smith's (actually bin Laden's) term, Iran would become the region's strong horse.

President Obama recognizes, quite correctly, that there are no good sides to either the wider conflict or the proxy battle itself. Assad and Hezbollah are vile, but the rebels, with their internal-organ-chewing commanders and rape-all-non-Sunni-women fatwas, are hardly paragons themselves. On the wider level, as appalling as the Iranian regime is, the Sunni axis, with its rabid jihadist threads, is scarcely creditable as an American ally. It's not difficult to understand the President's instinct to recoil from the whole mess, particularly since so many Americans agree with him.

But there's yet another layer to the conflict, one the President will ignore at the country's peril: Russia versus the United States. Vali Nasr has an excellent piece in today's Bloomberg in which he addresses a critical miscalculation made early on by the Americans about the Syrian morass:

Part of the U.S. calculation in declining to intervene has been the assumption that Assad would inevitably fall. The U.S., apparently, did not consider the implications of leaving the door open to a comeback by Assad. Reinforced by Hezbollah fighters and armed with Iranian and Russian weapons, the Syrian army broke through rebel lines in the central city of al-Qusair last week. The symbolic victory has dashed hopes for a quick end to the regime or a diplomatic resolution to the fighting...

Russia has assumed all along Assad could win, and thanks to Iran’s support, that now looks like a realistic outcome. Having already absorbed the wrath of Arab public opinion for supporting the ruthless leader, Russia has little reason to switch sides. By sticking with Assad, Russia projects the image of a steadfast ally that doesn’t bend to international pressure, in contrast to the U.S., which appears to want to wash its hands of the region and pivot away to Asia.

Considering the President's apparent outlook -- that American influence in the world ought properly to be diminished, if not outright apologized for -- it makes perfect sense for the Russians to pounce on the Syrian crisis. From the Russian perspective, the moment could hardly be more propitious for an energetic attempt to knock the US down to size.

That's according to Glen Greenwald at the Guardian:

The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America's largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.

The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.

The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.

The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa) granted the order to the FBI on April 25, giving the government unlimited authority to obtain the data for a specified three-month period ending on July 19.

Under the terms of the blanket order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls. The contents of the conversation itself are not covered.