Let’s say you have an argument to make about Issue X.  And let’s say there’s a great deal of merit to what you have to say.  Perhaps there is some part of your argument that reasonable people could disagree on in good faith, but you’re firmly convinced that your position on that much is valid, and as to the rest of it, you can prove it up to anyone’s reasonable standard of validity.

And then you pull some nickel-assed stunt like citing some alleged “study” in support of your argument, a “study” that you don’t provide a link to, and that is purportedly done by an outfit that, when you run a Google search, you find nothing at all directly related to that organization.

This is what some website doing business under the name “National Report” has done.  Under the breathless headline “New Study Reveals 89% of Nation’s Food Stamps Squandered On Junk Food,” they report that some group identified as “Malbeck Data Institute” has released a study involving alleged interviews with “over 100,000 men and women who are currently accepting SNAP assistance” (as reported at Conservative Frontline).  Neither site provides a link to any report of a study.  Google searches on “Malbeck Data Insitute,” “Malbeck Data,” and “Malbeck Institute” produce nothing that directs you to any website or other location where any such study results are available for public inspection, or even to a website under any variant of those names.  We are therefore to understand that an institute which has the wherewithal to interview “over 100,000” individual respondents does not have an online presence, does not publish its research online itself, and does not do so with some reputable online resource like Social Science Research Network.  A search there for a recent publication on the subject of “food stamps” also produces nothing along the lines of this alleged study, although there are articles addressing the subjects of food stamp fraud, recipients’ purchasing decisions, and so forth.  [Note (10 May 14):  I started this post yesterday after seeing a link to that article on Instapundit.  Apparently I wasn’t the only person who went checking around for this alleged study’s bona fides.]

Not content with the carnival-huckster headline, the author over at National Report favors us with lines like this:  “However, judging by what these individuals are choosing to purchase, it is evident that the majority of those who receive benefits are criminally milking the system for all it’s worth.”  This piece is not presented as an opinion piece, by the way.  Most of it is in fact presented as a write-up of what they allege to be their own, informal cross-check done through the simple method of watching what people at a Wal-Mart were buying with food stamps one day.

“Criminally milking the system,” though?  I didn’t see anything in that article, anywhere, to suggest that anyone purchased or attempted to purchase a single item not legally permitted to be bought with food stamps.  News flash:  If the program rules permit it, it isn’t “criminal.”  If it’s not illegal, it’s not even necessarily abusive.  I’m not aware that buying junk food somehow increases the amount of money you get to put on your SNAP card, so if this emaciated drug addict mentioned was loading up on candy bars then that’s just that much less money he had to buy something that would (as my mother used to say) “stick to his ribs.”  Another smiley-faced Wal-Mart customer mentioned, the 29-year-old mother of six (!), who disclaimed knowledge of who were the fathers of four of them (!!), is castigated for buying “microwavable entrees.”  Well, so what?  There are a great number of perfectly wholesome microwave family-sized dishes out there.  I’m not willing to conclude without more that this woman’s dietary choices were as flawed as her bedroom habits.

And this is where I get my butt chapped.  You see, there is tremendous waste in the SNAP program.  It shouldn’t be the case that you can buy candy and soft drinks and junk food with SNAP.  A few months ago I ran across a link to an article on Appalachia (I thought I’d linked to it in a blog post, but apparently I didn’t), and specifically to its gray market.  This article named names and places, by the way.  One of the phenomena described was how on the days that everyone’s SNAP card gets credited, you can see people pushing shopping carts through the grocery stores, and they’re entirely loaded with soft drinks.  As in hundreds of cans of soft drinks.  And nothing else.  What’s going on is that they’ll buy a case of soft drinks for $X, then turn around and sell it back to the store (or another store, assuming the case hasn’t been opened), for $0.50 on the dollar (the article in fact describes how some people will stock-pile soft drinks at home and use them as quasi-currency among themselves).  Store then repeats the process, and the SNAP recipient now has a pocket full of cash to go and spend on whatever else.  In Appalachia that all too frequently works out to mean meth and Oxycontin.  Notice, however, how the store is a critical player in this fraud.  There are many fewer stores to audit than SNAP recipients.  What does this suggest about where is the vulnerable link in this scheme?

Given the miracles of modern bar coding of absolutely everything under the sun that is sold at retail, it would be childishly simple to control very tightly for nutrition and quality everything that SNAP recipients buy.  Want your product to be eligible for purchase with SNAP?  Fine, you must put a bar code on each container sold separately at retail, and you must apply to HHS for that container of that product to be white-listed.  HHS then updates its master white-list monthly or so, and thus if our mother-of-six trots up and plops down the jumbo-sized pork rinds, the cash register spits it back out.  But that would of course make the cashiers’ jobs harder when mother-of-six looks at him and lies, “I didn’t know you couldn’t buy these things with food stamps.”  At which point he grabs the tub of butter she also bought and directs her attention to the tiny SNAP logo printed right beside its bar code.  “You see this logo, ma’am?  Show me that logo on that bag of pork rinds.  Everybody’s stuff you can pay for with your card has that logo on it.  If it ain’t got the logo you can’t buy it with food stamps.”

But, Gentle Reader objects, that would put unconscionable burdens on the manufacturers.  No it wouldn’t.  They’re asking the American taxpayer to buy, at his expense, their products for someone else to eat or drink.  Color me Scrooge, but I’m just not seeing that as an imposition beyond the pale.

Gentle Reader further objects to some government agency “dictating what poor people buy.”  That’s not what is proposed.  For starts, there will be thousands of products of all sorts which would be registered by their producers, and if you tell me I may select from among 17,500 potential items, but may not buy 4,750 others, you’re just going to have to pardon me for declining to think of that as dictating what I must buy.

Secondly, the application for approval process can be used in a secondary role to increase the quality of what poor people are eating.  For instance:  Go to your favorite deli (or refrigerator case) and look at the bologna, or cooked ham, or turkey, or whatever.  Somewhere on there it will state how much of that product, by weight, is . . . water.  In a lot of instances you’ll find that you’re paying $11.99 a pound for something that’s upwards of 30% water.  In Germany, by contrast, until recently (you can thank the EU-slugs for changing it) you could, by law, put two classes of ingredients into processed meat products:  meat and spices.  Period.  Or how about breakfast cereals?  Want the taxpayer to subsidize your customer’s purchase of your product?  Fine; just don’t put more than X% sugar or high-fructose corn syrup in it.  And so forth.  It’ll still be plenty sweet, but the sugar and corn industries won’t be getting a massive double subsidy out of the bargain (their production is already highly subsidized), and maybe the poor won’t be snookered into developing diabetes by age 45.

Will that increase the cost to the SNAP recipient of what he’s buying?  Yes; good food tends, overall, to be more expensive than cheap food (largely, no doubt, because cheap food products typically rely on heavily-subsidized ingredients like sugar and corn syrup; look at the top five ingredients in the junk foods sold in your local store, and then compare them with the comparable ingredients listing on the better-quality products).  On the other hand it is also a characteristic that junk foods by their metabolic effects tend to make your body crave them all the more, the more you eat.  Better-quality foods do that less.  So while our hypothetical SNAP recipient is “paying” (read: we’re paying for him) more for food, he’s getting a more lasting appetite satisfaction from it.  So in the long run he’ll need to eat less of it, and in fact will feel himself not hungry for longer.

What would be the net effects of all this on the food-intake needs and desires of SNAP recipients, both in their own terms and relative to the benefits they’re eligible to receive?  Can’t say, beyond the fact that they would be eating better overall.  And if the net effect is still an unacceptable overall price increase, because by hypothesis these things are going to be paid for electronically and will be linked to a computer database, HHS can negotiate price breaks with producers and/or retailers.  Remember it’s their customer who is being subsidized, and therefore their bottom line that’s being subsidized.  It’s no different from the exclusion of interest on municipal bonds from the bondholder’s gross income under § 103 of the Internal Revenue Code.  That is point-blank a subsidy for state and local government borrowers (they can borrow at significantly lower rates because their lenders won’t have to pay taxes on the interest), and Congress sure as hell is entitled to place such restrictions on the use of those borrowed funds as are necessary to ensure that the subsidy is not being abused.

Here I’ll also confess to something of sympathy with mother-of-six (if she exists).  I do about 70% of the cooking in our household, meaning I cook for myself and my three boys.  The wife won’t eat what I cook, by and large, so I gave up on that years ago.  If there are leftovers I’ll offer them but there’s a limit to how many different things I can cook for one meal.  When I cook for my boys, they get a meat-and-two minimum, and more typically a meat-and-three (daddy usually eats much more simply).  And then I do the dishes.  I also do a good bit of the laundry, and the overwhelming majority of the grocery shopping (when I go I bring back meat, vegetables, fruits, and primary ingredients; when the wife goes she brings back candied breakfast cereals and junk food, mostly).  And I work six days a week.  So I know what it means to bust ass and still try to put a more-or-less healthy meal on the table.  It’s not easy.  But it can be done.

You see?  I managed to make all of the above suggestions without once using words like “criminally” or “abused” or “lay-about” or “parasites” or “dead-beats” or similar expressions, or citing to some non-existent study to “prove” my points.  But over at the National Report and Conservative Frontline they’ve got to go that extra mile.  Given how fragile trustworthiness is in a universe like the internet, I can’t say that I could ever trust again something from their sites.  Pity.

[Update (12 May 14):  In reply to M. Simon’s question (thanks for commenting, by the way) as to whether “this post” was based on real studies or bogus ones, I’m assuming he’s referring to my post and not the posts I linked to.  I wish I’d remembered to bookmark that article on Appalachia I referred to, but I didn’t.  It was, however, in a “reputable” publication.  I can’t recall whether it was The Atlantic, or Bloomberg, or some other, but it was in a publication with some reputational stake in not just making stuff up.  As to overall observable purchasing patterns, I refer not only to what I’ve observed over the years myself, but also to several decades’ acquaintance with people involved in retail food, all the way from cash register jockeys to store owners.  They all have the same sets of comments, many of which boil down to, “You wouldn’t believe what gets bought with food stamps!”

As to the presence of processed sugar and high-fructose corn syrup in the national diet, by odd coincidence at lunch today I saw a physician from New York getting interviewed on Fox News on exactly this point.  He quoted numbers:  600,000 food products sold in America, and 80% of them contain “added sugar,” generally in the form of processed cane sugar or high-fructose corn syrup.  He held up a vial of what he represented was the sugar contained in one regular 12-oz. soft drink; it was a pretty thick test tube.  He then explained why high-fructose corn syrup is so insidious.  Apparently it suppresses release (he used the expression “shuts down”) of the hormone that tells your body you’re full and can stop eating.  And they showed side-by-side brain scans of the effect of sugar versus cocaine.

This doctor feller attributed the corn syrup’s popularity with food manufacturers to its comparative price relative to cane sugar.  And there’s a tie-in to M. Simon’s comment here as well.  Cane sugar is extortionately expensive in the U.S. because of ridiculously high tariffs on imported sugar.  Can’t recall the source any more, but once upon a time I saw the figure of a factor of five (or thereabouts; it’s been years since I saw that figure) is the cost increase that’s passed along to the American eater just in order to make domestic production pay.  And notwithstanding cane sugar is not a “natural” crop in our part of North America (in the sense of maize or wheat, both of which will grow just jim dandy in most of the continent), pay it does.  To give an illustration of just how high up these ties go and how lucrative they are for the welfare recipient:  Apparently the person whom then-President Clinton was talking to on the phone while a now-famous intern was pleasuring him was one of the principals in the leading domestic sugar producer.  Not that “ordinary” processed cane sugar is healthy by any stretch, but this particular piece of corporate welfare is not only massively increasing the cost of living to Americans at large, but it’s also indirectly contributing to significant increases in the incidence of morbid obesity.]

[Update (19 May 14):  While checking the weather for the next few days over at The Weather Channel, I ran into this link on the subject of added sugar in breakfast cereal.  They’ve got a slide show on a group of cereals each of which is at least 50% sugar by weight.  The winner is 88% sugar.  Plop a bowl of this in front of Junior and almost nine-tenths of what your child is shoveling into his face is processed sugar.  One pattern which struck me is how many of the cereals on this list are puffed-wheat products.  I remember having un-sugared puffed wheat cereals when a child, and they tasted like Styrofoam.  I also remember having un-sugared rice puff cereal, and it tasted that way but even more.  Regular corn flakes aren’t exactly packed with flavorful sensations either.  So why so many wheat puffs and not rice?  Why only one frosted flake product?  Maybe rice puff cereal has finally been moved over to the section with the monofilament tape, corrugated cardboard boxes, and other packaging products where it belongs?  In any event, if this Hall o’ Shame won’t put you off your feed, it ought to.]

[Update (15 Dec 14):  And for more on the subject of fructose’s effects on the body’s ability to recognize when it has taken on board enough fuel, we have this report.]

I don’t care if you have to download every malware or virus in the cyber-world to translate this article from today’s Frankfurther Allgemeine Zeitung.  Do it; it’s worth it.

My spam filter routinely catches all manner of e-mails according to the subject lines of which I am encouraged to . . . errrmmmmm . . . aahhhhh . . . enhance certain interpersonal experiences by quantum measures.  I don’t open them, for obvious reasons, but the overall tenor of the subject lines seem to intimate (pun) issues relative to . . . uuuummmmmm . . . dimension.

The poor sap in the linked article seems to have opened one of those e-mails, and actually gone to a doctor for the procedure.  Paid him €3,500 (that works out to something north of $4,800) for the procedure, the purpose of which was to increase girth.  And it worked!  Too well, alas; the patient alleged that the doctor used too much of whatever it was he was supposed to use, with resulting stricture that nearly prevented him from urination.  Files malpractice claim and has now lost.

But seriously:  $4,800 for a thicker Old Man?  And then dismay when things didn’t work out as hoped?  What color is the sun on this guy’s planet?

Somewhere, some day, someone will put together a graph to try to chart just where Western Civilization went over the edge.  This story will be a data point on that graph.

The other day I was chatting with someone (yes; people do occasionally talk to me).  My interlocutor was describing a video, or newsclip, or some representation seen of the private-sector computer geeks who were called in to fix the Healthcare.gov website.  You know, the website that, four years after its authorizing statute was passed, and after a $600+ million contract (to a Canadian company that had already been fired for incompetence in similar capacity for I think it was Ontario) still couldn’t do what it was intended to do.  Apparently one of the persons in the video expressed the thought to those assembled that “we’re not here to blame; we’re here to fix.”

The statement to me was that this was such a wonderful approach and one worthy of emulation across human existence because “blaming” someone else is to “absolve” oneself from the “responsibility for fixing it.” 

With reference to the superficial aspect of the computer geek quoted by the person I was chatting with, I’ll observe:  Congratulations.  You have a keen grasp of the obvious. 

But that’s not my point.  My point begins with the observation that my opposite number in this little chat has over the past years let pass almost zero opportunities (on the contrary, has strained mightily to invent them) to blame (i) Geo. W. Bush; (ii) Republicans in any office; (iii) anyone harboring any sympathy at any level to the Tea Party organizations; and, (iv) pretty much every breathing human who is not affiliated with sundry far-left — way far-left — political organizations for everything from unusually warm/cold weather to fluctuations in the business cycle to the Iranians wanting to nuke Israel to Israel announcing they weren’t going to stand for it to . . . well, you get the point.  In short, assignment of responsibility, by which I mean the attribution of a position in which the person to whom attributed could either have helped or hindered the observable consequence in issue, is made without any intelligently articulable basis, and on the basis of political affiliation.  The Koch brothers, who buy, sell, and refine petroleum, are eeeeeeevvilllll, because racism.  And shut up.  Besides, diversity.  George Soros, a major stakeholder in a Petrobras deep-water oil field, is a saint incarnate.  Even more to the point, the person with whom I was chatting has no more understanding of the internet, or computers, than the family dog.  I say that with complete sincerity; I know this person and I know their family dog.  Daylight does not show between them on this subject.

All of which is an insufferably long way of saying that my interlocutor had no meaningful basis on which to evaluate the statement so praised.

I pointed out that the mere act of identifying What Went Wrong necessarily implies a determination of in whose hands thing went wrong.  Events, especially events such as these, simply do not happen in a vacuum.  Building a website is not an organic process where one puts into operation processes the outcomes of which play themselves out independently of human intervention.  You might not “blame” someone for a crop failure (I lied: you can jolly well blame Geo. W. Bush and the Republicans) because there are multiple factors that go into making a crop which operate and interact with each other and which are entirely beyond the ability of any person (other than Geo. W. Bush and the Koch brothers) to control, or even influence.  The Healthcare.gov website fiasco was a series of conscious, affirmative decisions each last one of which had to be made by a specific human or group of humans.  So the ACA’s website failure was wholly unlike a crop failure caused by drought.  “The crop failed because it didn’t rain enough.”  “Who decided how much it would rain?”  To say that Healthcare.gov crashed because it was, for example, incapable of handling the ordinary traffic it needed to necessary implies the question, “How was it determined how much traffic it had to handle?” (you’ve got to answer that question because you don’t want to follow the same decisional rules and replicate your problem: garbage in, garbage out).  And asking how that determination was made cannot be answered without finding out who made the decision, and how.

But I was wrong, you see:  Even that limited inquiry is to seek to “absolve myself” from “responsibility” for fixing what’s wrong. 

I pointed out that identifying those responsible for a particular mess is important if only for the reason that you do not want to hire them again to create another mess.  This is of course especially true when the pool of vendors to accomplish a particular Task X is minuscule.  Gentle Reader will recall the uproar when Halliburton was awarded a no-bid contract to re-build Iraq.  Well, that was a legitimate concern to express.  The problem of course was that there were and are very few companies out there who have the expertise, the size, and the resources to re-build an entire country and its infrastructure.  And not all of them are American; Halliburton is.  The Canadian company that got the Healtcare.gov contract was awarded it on a no-bid basis.  Of interest in this particular case is that the company in question had already been fired from one huge IT project in Canada (I think it was for the Ontario government, but please don’t quote me on that).

But no:  That, too, was just a smoke-screen to evade “responsibility” for doing something positive.

Had I not run out of time for this little head-exploding conversation (had to leave), I could have pointed out that, when you’ve spent over $600 million on a four-year project that isn’t even close to being functional for any critical task, the people who ponied up that money have a damned good right to know who took them for a ride.  Governments are trustees; what they hold they hold (at least in theory; I know better than to confuse theory with the actual world) not for themselves but for their citizens.  Accordingly all governmental decision makers have an affirmative duty to engage in the exercise of finding out what went wrong, or right, and assigning blame or praise accordingly.

But most of all, without responsibility there can be no accountability.  While we’d all like to assume that government employees and government contractors will always Go The Extra Mile, always give 115%, always ask of themselves what they can do to make themselves better and less burdensome . . . we all know that’s not how human nature is wired.  The depressing truth is that we’re no better than we ought to be, the vast majority of us.  That’s so universally the case that when we meet someone who actually does do all those things or more, we revere him or her and (inwardly, at least) hang our heads in shame. For most of us, the most immediate motivator is a high regard for the consequences that will be visited on us if we fail to perform.  And by “consequences” I don’t mean just financial consequences.  The determination that you will never let yourself be known as a sloppy plumber, or a framer who can’t build a house square, level, and plumb is every bit the moral equivalent of grinding it out so that you don’t get sued or fired.

When you add to ordinary human nature the opacity of modern government work (either within or on a contract basis) you get a brew that is toxic to civic life unless powerful antidotes are prescribed and regularly consumed.  This isn’t, by the way, anything new under the sun.  I like maritime history; I’ve got shelves and shelves, most double-stacked, of books on the subject.  For hundreds of years it was just standard practice to pawn off on the navy short weight of rotten meat, contaminated flour, defective water casks.  Even Admiralty officials made a handsome living stealing timber and cordage, selling them on the black market, and re-supplying with second-hand or cast-off supplies.  Samuel Pepys in the mid-1600s made his bones down at the Admiralty by cracking down on precisely those habits.  Later in the Soviet Union the practice of tukhta (sometimes spelled “tufta”) was such an integral part of Soviet life that Solzhenitsyn described it as one of the pillars on which the entire Gulag existed.  Even later, in MiG Pilot, the story of Viktor Belenko’s Soviet Air Force career and defection to the West, you can find stories about warplanes unable to fly because the ground staff has drained the alcohol from the cooling systems to drink or sell.  Even after the Soviet Union was dead and gone (at least until Smart Diplomacy™ came along to give it another shot), you could stay in a Moscow apartment house where there would be rotting garbage in the stairwells, for days on end.  Adam Hochschild in The Unquiet Ghost describes exactly that experience.

I would — were I to finish my conversation — observe to my interlocutor that Pepys did not make such headway as he did by piously intoning that he wasn’t there to fix blame but rather to see that the Royal Navy got anchor cables that wouldn’t part in a storm.  He made progress by finding the thieves and getting rid of them.  The Soviet Union never did manage to learn to deal with the broad absence of a sense of ownership of one’s responsibilities.  It was the ground crews’ jobs to see that their aircraft could get into the air.  They didn’t, and nothing happened.  It was someone’s job to carry out the garbage in Hochschild’s apartment building.  And he didn’t, and nothing happened to him either.  It was the job of the Gulag administrators to account for — correctly — the cubic meters of timber belled in the taiga, to pour concrete without rubbish contaminating it, to make bricks that would not fall apart in a matter of a few years.  And they didn’t, with the result that within three years of Stalin’s death the system of large-scale slave labor essentially fell to pieces.

In short, failure of accountability has real-world outcomes.  Serious outcomes.  Outcomes that can literally bring down a superpower.  Remember that there was not a single foreign boot on Soviet soil in 1991.  There was not so much as an infantry platoon poised to invade.  Not so much as an unarmed hostile airplane occupied its airspace.  It had legions of well-wishers (including Dear Leader) throughout the world.  And in the absence of all of that it literally shut up shop and went out of business.  Just like that.  I can’t think of a single other instance in all of recorded human history where that’s happened (althogh I suppose you could make something of an argument that Czechoslovakia did the same thing, but that was not a bankrupt state falling apart but rather two pretty distinct ethnic groups mutually deciding they no longer wanted to be lumped in together, as had happened to them after the Great War).

I recently read Margaret MacMillan’s The War that Ended Peace.  It’s a book-length treatment of the few years before the war.  In fact, the war itself takes up only the epilogue.  MacMillan’s central question is why, when so many crises had come and gone without going over the edge, did things go so badly wrong in summer, 1914.  It’s a good question and one any scientist would ask himself.  If I’ve observed X on Y prior occasions, with a range of outcomes ech time excluding Z, and suddenly I get Z, what was different?  Of the points MacMillan makes, the one that is most pertinent to this post is that the switch-points, the triggers, the places at which those paths that could have lead to peace or war went one way rather than the other, were all specific decisions made by identifiable people.  People who had options, who could have done one thing and determined to do another.  It was a consious decision by a small number of men to accept no resolution with Serbia that did not involve war.  It was Kaiser Wilhelm’s personal statement to Count Hoyos that gave Austria-Hungary the famous “blank check.”  It was Nicholas II’s choice to threaten war on Serbia’s behalf.  It was a long-thought-through feature of the Schlieffen Plan to violate Belgian neutrality for the sake of avoiding the French border fortifications.  It was a bitterly-contested question in the British cabinet and in Parliament whether to deliver that ultimatum to Berlin when Belgium was invaded.  Each and every one of those decision-points has known names associated with it.

Is it irrelevant to call those names?  Was it irrelevant to do so in 1919?  History has seen the consequences of Germany being called out for its role in starting the war.  Of all the Versailles Treaty’s objectionable points, the one that rankled more than nearly any other was that war-guilt article.  Why?  It was the stated basis for the reparations claims, but then the reparations could have been demanded in any event.  I suggest that it was the consciousness of guilt that made it so repugnant.  You can pay the reparations.  You can re-conquer lost territory.  You can negotiate down all the material clauses of a bad agreement.  You can even just give the world the Bronx cheer and re-build your military.  But it’s the accountability that sticks:  You did this; you caused this; we are not going to pretend that you did not cause this, and you can never un-cause it.  I will suggest that it was the sense of moral outrage at that war-guilt clause, the having it rammed down their throats what their leadership had done, that so altered Germany’s moral awareness that fourteen years later it could go to the polls and return the Nazis to power.  Relative morality is a siren song, and it can’t be very surprising that Germany succumbed to it.

Would we nowadays?

You can sermonize about “avoiding having to take responsibility for fixing the problem” until you’re blue in the face, but unless you hold accountable those who made the problem you will always have more problems than you can take responsibility for fixing.  Worse, over time they will become problems which deteriorate to the point of no longer being fixable.  Worse even still, without the naming of names, without the holding accountable of those who are responsible, we subvert that sense of morality which is in the final analysis the basis of free government.  I didn’t figure that out myself, either.  That point figures prominently in Washington’s Farewell, a highly instructive essay on several levels, as I’ve noted before, here.  “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. . . .  It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. The rule, indeed, extends with more or less force to every species of free government. Who that is a sincere friend to it can look with indifference upon attempts to shake the foundation of the fabric?”

It is thus altogether well and proper that we should ask who made a pig’s breakfast of Healthcare.gov, how they did so, and how they came to be in a position to do so.  Not to do so is to be, in Churchill’s wonderful expression, “neutral as between the fire brigade and the fire.”

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This morning while brushing my teeth I realized I need a haircut.  I am convinced I am not alone in my whipsaw of never remembering I need a haircut until I have no time to get a haircut, and promptly forgetting all about when the time is there to do it.  One of life’s minor injustices, to be sure.

On those rare occasions when memory and opportunity intersect, I go to a barbershop.  A men’s barbershop.  Not a “stylist,” not a unisex, Top 40 playing in the background metrosexual personal expression facilitation operation.  A barbershop.  Since at least 1970 it’s been there, in that same location in the arcade (it’s a re-development, from back before the word was fashionable, of an old movie theater) down past the cubby-hole offices of the businesses that come and go, some on to better things, others towards the recollections of old men’s conversations that start with, “Hey; you remember when ol’ Joe Jones had that surveying business down here? ”  For decades two guys ran the shop — it’s two chairs, with a naugahyde bench running down the opposite wall — and one of them is still there.

The floor is red-and-white tile.  The red’s faded to a sort of dirty pinkish color, and the white is what some marketer at Sherwin Williams might think of as “Ancient Yellow.”  The naugahyde bench is held together in several places by duct tape (as it should be).  On the wall above the bench are (i) a pencil drawing of a much-younger Billy cutting a child’s hair; (ii) a price list for services that include things guys used to go to barbershops for but haven’t for decades now; and, (iii) a picture of some horse that seems to have won some accolade in a horse show.  They’ve been there, in precisely those positions, since I’ve been going there, which means since the mid-1990s.  On the far wall are two framed collections of arrow and spear heads.  Until a few years ago they also had one of those soft drink machines — it was an RC machine — where you put your money in, then opened a tall, narrow door and reached in to pull your selection out.  One day it was gone, and when I asked Billy said the compressor had gone out and it would have cost him too much to have it fixed or replaced.  I was crushed; so far as I know that was the last operational such machine in the county.  Now all that’s left are those ghastly behemoths with back-lit top-to-bottom plexiglas fronts and flashing lights with . . . buttons you push.  Coke machines are coke machines and pinball machines are what they are, and I disapprove of mixing media.

In election years there’s usually a piece of poster board (hand-drawn) with the local races and candidates listed on it, and boxes beside each name.  Purely on the honor system, you can go put an “x” in a box beside your candidate.  Historically it’s proven a not-unreliable indicator of the hopefuls’ respective outcomes.

Billy’s old enough to be my father.  I know that because his two children were a year ahead and a year behind me in school.  When I go I’m frequently the youngest customer by 25-30 years.  I’m turning 49 exactly six months from today.  “Bustle” is not a verb or noun you’d associate with the pace of business there.  I don’t mind sitting on the bench, waiting my turn, and I don’t mind spending 20 minutes on a haircut that a military barber would spend about 1:15 doing.  I listen to the other customers and Billy talk with each other.  I hear a lot of names, some of which I recognize, some of which are people I know, and a good deal of which are complete strangers.  At their ages the conversation is usually about who’s sick, who’s well, who just buried his wife, who’s finally too old to put in a garden this year, and so forth.  It’s the easy rhythm of sociability, of conversations that you realize are decades old by the time you hear them.  In fact, they’ve been having this conversation since the 1950s and you’re just hearing the latest 30-minute installment of it.  You’ll hear about people’s children and grandchildren, who’s married, who’s back from college, who’s in trouble and who’s taking over the family shop.  Sometimes you’ll hear about Local Characters and their doings over the years.  I still recall the time that everyone was reciting all the local businesses this one ol’ boy has been invited never to come back to.  It was priceless.

They give a pretty OK haircut down there.  I’ve worn my hair more or less the same way since about 1973 and so my standards are not very high.  In terms of self-expression I’m just happy if my hair doesn’t proclaim, “I am an idiot,” too loudly.

The boy who used to cut with Billy retired (around here we say “retarded”) and moved off to be closer to his boy who lives a couple of counties over.  I was worried because shortly thereafter Billy “taken sick” and it was an open question whether he’d be back.  But he found some younger boy (who’s actually younger than I am) who’s now got the other chair, and so it looks as though the Succession is safe for the time being.

[Aside:  Here I must pass some observations on the word “boy” and its usage.  A few weeks ago some boy name of Toobin wrote a disparaging article in the The New Yorker about how awful it is that Clarence Thomas doesn’t speak much if at all during oral argument at the U.S. Supreme Court, and spends a great deal of time leaning back staring at the ceiling while $1,000+/hour lawyers drone on in front of him.  Ann Althouse, who teaches law at Wisconsin and runs an eponymous blog, linked to it and prompted a merry firestorm of vituperation in the comments section.  She’s got a pretty loyal crowd of commenters, some typically supportive, others less so, and some of whom seem to have their own axes to grind and do so, relentlessly.  Among the latter are some who are, shall we say, sensitive to issues of “race.”  A segment of the comments to that particular post circulated around the dynamic that this Toobin boy seems to expect that Thomas shall entertain him, like some minstrel show.  Within those comments the subject of “boy” came up.  As everyone knows, “boy,” like “son,” was an address of condescension employed by whites towards blacks, back in the day.  This is unfortunate, because around here every male under the age of about 75 is a “boy.”  I am my father’s boy and everyone in town knows me as such and will know me as such until I die.

I once had to explain to a lawyer from Minnesota the broad outlines of “boy” and its permutations, because they are not co-extensive.  Specifically, if you wish to understand and be understood around here, you need to know, among other intricacies, the distinctions between boy, ol’ boy, good boy, and good ol’ boy.  As mentioned, every male under 75 is a boy:  “Earnest that boy he just won’t get that no one’s gonna give him more than $1,500 an acre for that farm of his daddy’s.”  (Notice the triple subject, a common grammatical construct around here.)  An ol’ boy is generally (of course, context is everything, as usual) a boy who ain’t no account:  “Clarence?  That ol’ boy ain’t taken a sober breath since spring of 1963 and I don’t reckon he’s about to start now.”  A good boy will show up on Sunday afternoon after church and pressure wash his widow neighbor lady’s front porch:  “Junior’s a awful good boy; he’s been Real Good to his momma since his daddy passed.”  A good ol’ boy might have laid out of church because he had him a couple or fifteen too many Saturday evening, and he might be carrying a twelve-pack when he shows up, but he’ll still come over on Sunday afternoon and pressure wash his widow neighbor lady’s front porch:  “Shirley’s jus’ a good ol’ boy; he ain’t goin’ nowhere but he’d give you the shirt off his back if you needed it.”]

I recall when Barbershop came out.  I enjoyed it, sufficiently so that I bought the movie on DVD some time later.  In addition to being funny I thought it interesting how the character of the goof-ball white boy is handled.  Most of the time, of course, if there’s a black character in a mainstream movie he’s the one who sticks out, and it’s his mode of expression, of existence, that is “treated” as being the non-standard.  He’s the dramatic contrast, in other words.  Barbershop exactly flips that; it’s the white guy who’s the mustard splotch on the shirt front.  But most of why that movie resonated with me had Zero to do with the physical attributes of the actors and actresses.  I liked that movie because that’s where I go to get my hair cut.  And the social role the shop plays in that movie neighborhood is exactly what my barbershop plays here in my own county.  We don’t have a Checker Fred down at the arcade, but there used to be a barbershop just off Main Street here (curiously enough, the guy who ran that shop happened to be black) and there was some boy — when I met him he must have been in his 60s — who hung out there who’d bet you the price of the drink that he could finish a coke faster than you could.  I saw it done, too; he had the talent of being able to swallow without swallowing, so to speak, and he could kill a standard bottle of Coke in about ten seconds.  That’s not an exaggeration, by the way.  So when I saw Barbershop it felt like meeting a bunch of old friends.

Among the many reasons why I chose to raise my own boys back here is so that they will have — I hope — the chance to experience places like the barbershop.  They’re places which communicate, very subtly, the message that Here is Where You Belong.  You don’t have necessarily to stay here, but I suggest that everyone needs a hole, so speak, that fits his own shape perfectly, and into which he can ease himself. 

Nowadays they call it “alienation,” a fashionable name for the feeling you get when you realize that there’s no place for you, that you don’t belong anywhere.  Observe by the way that belonging everywhere is belonging nowhere.  “Alienation” is a hobby indulged in by people who spend a tremendous amount of energy contemplating how alienated they are.  I remember back in 2008, when Dear Leader was running against McCain.  I ran across a quotation from one of Dear Leader’s (apparently ghost-written, it seems) books . . . about himself, of course.  He talks about how “alienated” he felt, and I realized that there was no better contrast between the two candidates than that word.  John McCain grew up in the Navy, likely still keeps in touch with his Academy classmates, and survived years of torture (at the hands of people whose eventual victory Dear Leader celebrates) only by forging a tightly-knit web of surreptitious support and communication with his fellow prisoners (read In Love and War, Admiral Stockdale’s joint memoir with his wife; that’s what John McCain survived).  I wonder whether McCain even understands the notion of feeling “alienated.”

“Alienation” is, like so much else, something of a choice.  I have a very dear friend who recently departed from the Big City to a smallish town out in what he probably grew up thinking of as The Sticks.  Among his other hats, he wears one as Musician, specifically jazz/swing (although he also plays other stuff as well, those seem to be his home).  What with Life and All, I haven’t seen him in years, but keep up, more or less, via Facebook.  I’ve watched years of his posts now, and a great deal of them deal with the perceived contrast between Places Where There are Hep Cats, and places where there are not.  I gather his new home is a Place Where There are Squares, and he seems to lament that fact.  Poor boy.  He needs him a barbershop.  He needs to drop that Squares vs. Hep Cats shit and go volunteer at the local humane society shelter.  Get involved in Meals on Wheels.  Call the local high school band director and see if the drum line could do with a volunteer helper.  Join the Rotary or Kiwanis.  Show up at the booster club’s pancake breakfast. 

He needs to find his barbershop, and until he does, I’m afraid he’s doomed to feel “alienated.”

I wonder where I caught it.  I’d always thought that I’m noticeably porcine because (i) I eat too much damned food, and (ii) I drink too much damned beer.

What a relief it was to stumble across this article.  Being a fat body is actually a disease, you see, just like pneumonia is a disease, or being HIV-positive, or being scrofulous (I love that word, by the way).  Now I can blame “society” for not being able to bend over to tie my shoelaces, and for being left winded by the walk up my driveway to check the mailbox.  “Andrews-Looper blames American society, saying it’s the oversized portions and calorie consumption producing overweight people.”  Silly me, all along I thought I’m too fat because I forgot to shut my pie-hole somewhere along the way.

By the way, guys, “society” is all of y’all.  So what are y’all going to do to slim my butt back to where it ought to be?

With apologies to Dean Swift, I offer herewith my modest proposal to address the IRS issue, by which I mean the joyful readiness with which the IRS — apparently all divisions of it — whores itself out as a general-purpose thug for the benefit of left-wing political interests.

The problem is how do you get an institution to change its direction when the people in charge of giving it that direction know themselves to be effectively immune from any consequences of any sort. Congress can’t fire Lois Lerner. The DoJ, under command of a flagrant perjurer, is certainly never going to bring either civil or criminal action down on her. Even if Dear Leader does decide to throw her under the bus, she’ll go roost at some think tank, university, law firm, or consultancy for a few years, and the next Democrat administration to come along will find her back at presidential-appointment level. She’ll retire full of years and pension benefits. Like as not she’ll be drawing a six-figure salary as a board member of some “non-profit” funded by whichever Geo. Soros clone is active at that time. The people whose lives and businesses she’s ruined? They won’t even get “good government.”

The federal government (and state governments too, by the way) is bursting at the seams with Lois Lerners large and small.

I suggest that the objectives of any resolution must be to (i) give the legal ability to go after the Lois Lerners of the bureaucracy hammer and tongs to private individuals who have actually been injured by her; (ii) put in play not only her present job but all of her accrued goodies built up over a career of sucking intermittently at the public tit; (iii) put in jeopardy her ability ever to hold a government job at any level ever again; and, (iv) make her such a poison pill that she will be unemployable by any of the groups which seem to exist principally as a cushy landing place for people like her. 

The first is the easiest to craft: Congress simply provides that any person or organization which can show itself to have been injured or have its rights compromised shall have an independent (i.e., not contingent upon action or non-action by the likes of Eric Holder) civil right of action in the plaintiff’s home federal district court. The right of action shall be cumulative with any other administrative proceeding, civil action, or criminal prosecution, and the pendency of any such other process shall not prejudice the plaintiff in the commencement or prosecution of the private action. The private action shall not be stayed by any filing under the Bankruptcy Code, nor will any bankruptcy court have jurisdiction to hear any matter pertaining to it. Any refusal to testify or respond to discovery under any claim of privilege shall, as to the private right, constitute an absolute admission on the point(s) implicated. Provide that there shall be no attorney-client privilege as to any conversation, written, or electronic communication between any person employed by the IRS any other person, excepting only the IRS’s employee’s attorney of record in the private action. Provide that not only the individual IRS agent involved but every person in that agent’s chain of command, up to and including the commissioner, shall be a party defendant, shall be subject to compulsory process in the forum court, and shall be subject to all forms of discovery. Provide that the defendant shall not be entitled to a government-provided defense, but shall, if successful in defending all but not less than all claims, have a right to reimbursement from the government for any actual expenses of defense incurred. Make every person’s employment and continuation in employment contingent upon such person’s accepting in full all of the provisions of the statute. Give a similar right, with similar procedural safeguards, of action to any employee who is disciplined, discharged, demoted, or otherwise experiences an adverse employment action by reason of his refusal to engage in the prohibited conduct. 

The remedies in the action would include, mandatorily: (i) personal, non-dischargeable liability for all monetary injury caused by the acts and omissions forming the basis of the suit; (ii) personal, non-dischargeable liability for punitive relief in the greater of, say, 250 times any compensatory damages awarded, or $10 million; (iii) personal, non-dischargeable liability for all of the successful plaintiff’s attorney’s fees and expenses of litigation; (iv) termination of all federal employment and permanent ineligibility for any office, elective or appointive, in the federal government, whether compensated or not; (v) forfeiture of all pay and benefits received in respect of federal employment, retroactively to the first date on which any such prohibited conduct is found to have occurred, the liability for restitution to be subordinate to the successful plaintiff’s and likewise non-dischargeable in bankruptcy; and, (vi) irrevocable assignment of all post-employment benefits, Social Security, federal retirement, as well as sums held within or payments from any “qualified plan” (this would sweep in IRAs, 401(k) plans, and state and local retirement benefits) and proceeds of life insurance policies, to the successful plaintiff to pay any monetary award made. Expressly make all those benefits subject to execution notwithstanding any federal or state statutory exemption from execution. Make all assets in which the losing defendant has any interest, legal or equitable, subject to execution to satisfy the judgment, again notwithstanding any otherwise applicable exemption (we’ll have no O. J. Simpsons living in a Florida mansion and enjoying an unlimited homestead exemption). 

Well, OK Gentle Reader says. Lois isn’t a federal worker any more. What’s to stop her signing on for a mid-six-figure job with the University of BLANK to teach . . . oh, whatever grievance studies course they feel like offering her? This is how: You simply make ineligible for federal tax exemption any organization which employs any person against whom judgment has been rendered pursuant to the statute. You make ineligible for any federal contract any organization which employs any such person. You make ineligible for exemption or contracting any organizations which pay more than, say, $5,000 in any year to any one or more than entities or organizations in which any such person has more than a 1% stake in the equity or profits, or which itself pays any such person more than $5,000 or so per year. You bar from lobbying any organization which hires or contracts with any such person. And so forth. You create a whistle-blower’s right of action with a 30% recovery of the first three years’ tax obligations of any violating tax-exempt organization. 

You’re not preventing Lois from working; you’re not even preventing her from working in her area of expertise (tax law). What you are doing is preventing her, having violated the public trust in that fashion, from drawing a subsidy from the American taxpayer, either directly or indirectly.  By like token you’re not preventing any employer from ever hiring Lois. You’re just asking them to choose which is more important to them: providing a comfortable retirement for someone like Lois or not paying taxes.

 To the argument that this would “chill” competent people from going into government service, I say bullshit. If Lois calls down to the Cincinnati office and tells them to git after them nasty, stinky Tea Partiers, which would you rather chill – the employee who will tell Lois to go pound sand up her ass and by the way this call was recorded, or on the other hand the employee who’ll say certainly and what specific groups does Ms. Lerner have in mind to target?  What you will chill is the dishonest, the power-mad, the megalomaniacal. 

Maybe once a few higher-ups have had their lives ruined by engaging in these sorts of monkey shines the message will get out that it really doesn’t matter who’s in the White House, a government employee identification card is not a license to be a law unto oneself. I’ll take any incidental chilling that happens. Collateral damage or, as Dear Leader referred to our four dead Americans in Benghazi, “bumps in the road.”

 And if you think none of this is really an issue, after all, take a look at what happened to someone who challenged the labor-union ridden TSA, and had the guts to testify before Congress about it.

And look what happens.

To all my loyal readers reader, my sincerest apologies for having gone all Rip Van Winkle on this venture for the better part of three months. I can’t even correctly recall precisely why it was that I went quiet, back then. I do know that for the better part of two full months I was at general quarters, getting ready for a jury trial that got postponed a week before it was supposed to kick off. In any event, the sensation of having abandoned something one set out to do is merited and oppressive.

And what a three months it’s been. We’re still no closer to finding out why the administration left four Americans, including its ambassador, to be slaughtered. We know that someone senior in the picture actively got involved in lying to the American public about the incident, for weeks on end. We know that the one person in the whole show who could have credibly shifted America’s focus onto what happened – Genl Petraeus – just happened to have made himself extremely vulnerable to blackmail at that time, and that he, though having earned a reputation for speaking his mind irrespective of the politics of the moment, strangely went along with the deception. If the inference is warranted that he remained silent, knowing that the administration was intentionally peddling a bogus version of what happened that night, in the hopes of saving his own hide, then (a) what a rube, and (b) he no more than fell afoul of one of the oldest saws out there: Never give a sucker an even break. You’d think that someone who’s navigated the (literally) cut-throat morass of Iraq would have understood that someone like Dear Leader simply doesn’t keep promises, especially not to people whose existence has become inconvenient. Let us recall what one of Dear Leader’s heroes, known for at least some period at the Great Helmsman, observed about mean who were problems: Get rid of the man, get rid of the problem. Once Dear Leader was safely re-elected (with the vigorous assistance of the Internal Revenue Service), the general was expendable. And he was expended. 

The now-former Sec’y of State has appeared before the Congress, and in response to the pointed question of who commanded the lie be told, shot back, “What difference does it make at this point?” By saying which she actually answered several questions all at once, viz. (i) I know who gave the order. (ii) I’m not going to say because I still need this person’s assistance in achieving my ambitions for the future. (iii) All that business about “executive over-reach” I was spouting during the eight years of Bush’s presidency was just a load of nonsense to look good in newsprint. 

I’m an ol’ sailor, and in inshore piloting, if you can get two intersecting lines of bearing, then you know where you are, because there’s only one point on the surface of the globe that simultaneously satisfies the conditions of bearing 217 degrees from Point A and 104.5 degrees from Point B. So let’s focus on which universe of people could conceivably satisfy both conditions of (i) being in a position to give the order, and (ii) being someone necessary to Hillary’s ambitions. Looked at that way, it’s a pretty small universe, isn’t it? 

Then we’re treated to a look inside the IRS. It turns out that a large part of why the Tea Party movement, which so thoroughly ran the table in 2010, was so oddly quiescent in 2012 was because their grass-roots organizations (and they’re all grass-roots in that movement; there simply isn’t such an outfit as The Tea Party) couldn’t raise money. Well why ever not? It seems that as folks began to study on the practicalities of formal political action, they realized they needed some degree of personal liability protection. They also needed a tax-exempt letter from the IRS. Now here’s something that the uninitiated sometimes don’t always realize right off the bat: It doesn’t matter what sort of an organization you are, or what your mission is, or what you do or don’t do; you’re not an exempt organization until the IRS determines that you are an exempt organization and tells you so much in writing. So what happened to the applications for tax-exempt status? Well, they were referred to a special group of people, who were given very specific instructions on how to see to it that these organizations got the Full Treatment. At first they were told to look for groups with “patriot” or “tea party” in their names. That dragnet was both too blatant and too porous for the administration’s purposes, so after a little while the focus was watered down to groups which stated that their goal was arguing for smaller, less intrusive, less expensive government. 

Groups caught up in it got swamped with hundred of questions, all the way from demanding to know who their donors were (and as it later turns out, the donors disclosed were then the subject of bogus gift tax “audits,” trying to levy gift taxes on the contributions made to the victim organizations), demanding to know who attended their meetings, what was said at the meetings, for groups with an overtly religious cast, what were the contents of their members prayers, and on and on and on. Hundreds and in some cases thousands of pages of documentation and answers were to be provided. Each round just brought more bullshit questions, and when the questions stopped, the applications disappeared into a black hole. No action one way or the other. Very clever, that: If the IRS had denied the application the organizations could have brought suit in federal court to challenge the denial, but without a denial. For months and in some cases years (some of the groups still don’t have a decision on way or the other) the IRS strung them out, and during all that time their ability to raise money was minimal. 

But it didn’t stop with the IRS. Prominent activists (like the husband and wife who, having observed massive voter fraud in Houston, organized a group – True the Vote – to monitor and document the abuse, and then of course eventually to fight back against it) suddenly found themselves subject to the interest of multiple federal agencies who for years had shown zero curiosity about them or their businesses. The True the Vote folks found themselves the subject of a surprise inspection by OSHA and not one but two audits by the ATF, as well as tax audits of their business and themselves personally. 

And so the Tea Party financial apparatus was crippled during the two years before the election. Every public statement thus far made about the genesis and supervision of the persecution has proven to be false, usually demonstrably so. There was a sudden surge in applications under Section 501(c)(4) in 2010? Uh, no. Leftist groups were the subject of identical treatment? Nope, not a one has come forward or been identified. Just a bunch of rogue agents in the Cincinnati office? Not true either; the program was from the very beginning known to and the subject of orchestration by senior IRS officials. Nobody in a position of authority knew about it? Try again; no less than the IRS senior counsel personally knew what was going on. 

What’s interesting is that the story was self-reported – kinda sorta – by a question planted at a news conference. The IRS apparatchik giving the conference, Lois Lerner (about whom more in a bit), arranged for a lawyer/lobbyist to ask a specific question about a forthcoming IRS Inspector General report on the fiasco. It was at that conference that ol’ Lois first tried out the “few rogue agents” bullshit. But that’s not the most interesting aspect of the case. The IG’s report was the report of an audit, which is nothing more than exactly that: The IG’s folks ask questions but have no compulsory power. If the audit discovers evidence of wrong-doing, the next step is an actual investigation, in which the IG does have compulsory powers, can put people under oath, and can generally crack heads. The IG audit report in question makes some very specific findings of misconduct, some of which may even be criminal in nature. But an investigation was never begun. It stopped with an audit.  Gerald Walpin, the (former) IG of the a federal agency who got himself fired when he refused to back down on a $750,000 theft of government money – by a prominent supporter and donor of Dear Leader, but Gentle Reader knew that without asking – has an interesting and under all the history of this administration compelling theory that the omission was entirely predictable. He recites a litany of IGs who made the mistake of pushing too hard on issues of concern to the administration, and who paid for it with their jobs. 

The DoJ has been busted for monitoring the communications of a host of Associated Press reporters, including their communications from within the Capitol itself, specifically the House Cloak Room. Those reporters of course got off comparatively lightly, as far as intrusiveness goes. A Fox News reporter (will coincidences never cease?!?) not only has all his personal communications monitored, but even his mother gets the same treatment. That of course required warrants, and to get it the Attorney General of the United States lied to a federal judge. The affidavit (sworn, dontcha know) alleged that the reporter in question was potentially a defendant co-conspirator in an act of criminal espionage. Later, the same AG stands in front of Congress and allows that he had “no involvement” in obtaining the warrant. Then it comes out that he’d given his personal approval to the affidavit seeking the warrant. All this raises the interesting philosophical point of whether it’s more permissible to lie under oath to Congress or to a federal judge in order to take a mighty chop at the tree of a free press. 

Well, those nasty, eeeevillll, violent Tea Partiers just asked for it, after all (no, seriously: we had a Congressmember say that in public), and that uppity Fox News feller should have expected as much, working for Satan himself. In plain English, they’re Other People. If we just keep our heads down, don’t question the government, we’ll be OK, won’t we? Won’t we? Ehhhhh . . . maybe not. We now discover a bit more of the true extent to which The Man has been watching us for years now. Every call we make, every e-mail we send has its metadata sent to and stored by the National Security Administration. The current program traces back to a Bush-era program in which the initial aim was to monitor communications crossing U.S. borders (don’t need a warrant to snoop on international communications). I admit I’m a bit sketchy on the full and technical details of what’s out there thus far, but at some point the program morphed into capturing the originating and recipient phone numbers of all telephone calls. The likely scope of what’s being hoovered (that’s actually an insider’s expression and refers not to the household appliance company but to the former FBI director) is of course much, much greater. 

In light of the revelations, we see the inevitable and utterly predictable blow-back from this all: International users of the communications systems are going to avoid U.S. providers, U.S. hardware companies (how can they be sure that the snooping software isn’t hard-wired into it, after all?), and we have to presume U.S. trading partners if possible. I mean, if they can pull that information from your computer when you send an e-mail, how difficult would it be to plant something on your computer in the first place? Stuxnet, anyone (which Dear Leader bragged – publicly – that the U.S. had placed on Iran’s nuclear weapons equipment)? 

The justification for this degree of surveillance is that it’s necessary to protect us from terrorism. Well, that’s reassuring, isn’t it? It’s indispensable that the federal government know every website I visit so that it can ignore not one, not two, but three specific warnings about specific individuals – the brethren Tsarnaev – given to it by two completely independent countries’ intelligence agencies. They have to know every time I fire up the ol’ Samsung because it would be just way too much trouble to infiltrate and monitor mosques, even mosques known to be recruiting centers for home-grown jihadists. The NSA has to analyze what it means – if anything – each time I send an e-mail to a particular address because if it didn’t, they would have to do complicated shit like follow up on Facebook postings by people that foreign governments have specifically warned us are radicalized, actively engaged with known terrorist organizations and agents, and are planning active operations in the U.S. 

All this and more over the dam since I went cold, dark, and quiet. I confess I’m still not completely satisfied in my mind which of the revelations I find the most egregious. Of all of them I’m least exercised by the reporters’ laments. I’m not a scholar of the First Amendment – I can’t really say I’m much of a scholar of anything, come to think of it – but while there is something to be said in favor of the proposition that press freedom is a limiting factor on the government’s ability to impose penalties on the press for dissemination of sensitive data, in point of fact it can’t be a secret to any reporter whose beat includes the hush-hush parts of Uncle Sugar’s House of Nuts that a good deal of what his usual sources tell him they’re breaking the law if they tell him. 

The specific revelation that got the Fox News dude in hot water was the tip that North Korea was expected to respond to particular sanctions by staging another nuclear test. It seems that information could only have come from sources very high within the North Korean regime, and the news story pretty much clued whichever Kim is this generation’s lunatic in to the fact that we had a source that high up. Depending on how that information was known within that regime, whoever our source was/is may well be on his way to a one-night stand in front of a wall in an execution cell somewhere. If he’s not been sent on his way already. So to pretend that this is a First Amendment issue pure and simple is not honest. I mean, let’s just say that Movietone decided to run a story on when Operation Overlord was set to go. Or if the BBC had run a story that Case Yellow – the invasion of France and the Low Countries – was set for early May, 1940. Would we object, per sé, to a warrant issuing on the people known or believed to have been involved in the security breach? 

The NSA story I find more unsettling, because the federal government has chosen to spy on me in lieu of more specific, less intrusive methods of guarding me from the folks out there who are known to exist. As hinted at above, until 2011 the FBI had an active program in place to infiltrate mosques, especially and specifically mosques whose congregants or clergy were known to have or reasonably suspected to have ties to terrorist organizations. We apparently monitored pretty closely what they did. That program was discontinued at the behest of CAIR – the Council on American Islamic Relations – an organization that if memory serves was itself an unindicted co-conspirator in several criminal terrorism prosecutions. Successful prosecutions. The revelations about what we knew about the Tsarnaev brothers, and when, illustrate the point even better. The Russian security agency warned us about the elder brother not once but twice. The Saudi intelligence boys also (according to a report in Mail Online; alas you have to read the foreign press to get a clear picture of what’s happening on this side of the ocean) gave not only the U.S. but also the British specific intelligence about Brer Tsarnaev’s activities and his intentions. The brilliant boys at the FBI and the CIA took those reports and did . . . nothing. They certainly didn’t share them with the old-fashioned gum-shoes in the Boston P.D., who might have put a tail on them. It wasn’t like the brothers were being secretive about any of their thoughts or actions, either. They put them right out there on Facebook. In summary, with this NSA operation the government has opted to go in for domestic spying – on me – on an historically unprecedented scale, with only theoretical likelihood of actually catching a bad guy in time, and at a time when it either refuses outright to engage in ordinary municipal police department quality investigation of known threats, or can’t be bothered to do the job properly when it does so bestir itself. It would be like a football team spending all of its practice time and budget on trick plays, rather than blocking drills, running pass patterns, and tip drills. Harlem Globetrotter stuff instead of practicing free throws and breaking a full-court press. 

The Benghazi fiasco outrages me, but more not on a fundamental level. Administrations have always tried to suppress bad news and blunders. The worse the blunder the more energy they’ve spent on hiding the truth. It’s what administrations do, and while I fully see the wickedness and cynicism of our betraying those Americans in that hell-hole that we helped create – that Dear Leader illegally helped create – it doesn’t strike me as something that endangers our American Experiment. 

The IRS abuses, however, are what make all the other scandals intolerable. The IRS is the one agency which touches almost every last American. If you’re sixteen and have a summer job, the payroll taxes withheld from your paycheck flow through the IRS. If you’re a single parent with a ninth-grade education and you’re trying desperately not to slip into perpetual welfare dependency, the EITC advance refund you get is processed by the IRS. If you’re a tobacco farmer the excise taxes paid on the end-product of your fields is enforced by the IRS. And of course if you’re part of that only slightly-more-than-half of the American adult population that pays federal income taxes, what the IRS does and how it does it shapes whether you have a job, what kind of a career path or pay curve you have within that job, and of course how much you bring home each pay period. With the enactment of the ACA – it bothers me to hear it called “Obamacare” because in fact Dear Leader was strangely uninvolved with its drafting; if anything it ought to be called “Pelosicare” or “Baucuscare” – the IRS will be in charge of determining what kind of health insurance you can buy, from whom, and at what price. 

We see now laid bare that the IRS views itself as being the enforcement arm of a particular political party and movement. While it was holding up, in many cases for months and years, the 501(c)(4) applications of the sundry conservative organizations, hamstringing their ability to raise money to pursue their goals, the lefty organizations’ applications sailed on through with minimal fuss. Lois Lerner (q.v.) was among the guiding lights of the plan, and here it’s not unimportant to note that this was not her first rodeo. She used to be counsel for the Federal Election Commission’s enforcement division. Back in 1996 a young Republican challenged an Illinois Democrat in a Congressional race (I’m thinking it was Dick Durbin, but I could be wrong). About a month before the election he mysteriously got popped with a full-bore FEC investigation. It cost him nearly $100,000 and it was eventually determined entirely in his favor. But around the time it was launched, he got a call from the FEC. “Promise me you’ll never run for office again and we’ll drop this case,” he was told by the FEC lawyer. His caller? One Lois Lerner. It was dear ol’ Lois again who required, as a condition for approving an anti-abortion group’s application for tax-exempt status, that its board members promise never to picket a Planned Parenthood office. 

Several former IRS employees have made the point that what happened to these conservative groups was so far outside the boundaries of what is known to be permissible behavior within the IRS (like leaking the donors of groups who had applications still pending, an offense for which the penalty is criminal), and the penalties for it so draconian (at least if you’re a peon, as was the case with the Cincinnati office staffers; if you’re Lois Lerner or the senior counsel who were pulling the strings your stakes are entirely different), that there is simply no way in heaven or hell these things would have been done without very specific instruction from very highly placed people in the central IRS command structure. 

When called on the carpet before Congress dear Lois put on hauteur which would have made Marie Antoinette proud. The elected representatives of the American people were no more than canaille, Pöbel, villeins (I note here that within the past few days we observed the anniversary of Wat Tyler’s un-doing: “Villeins ye are, and villeins ye shall remain,” spake Richard II to the assembled peasants, whereupon his men-at-arms made short work of them), narod. How dare you question one of the anointed? What she is asserting is neither more nor less than the right of the bureaucracy to do as it pleases, and be damned to any enactment of Congress. And to do it in the service of a partisan political goal. 

Richard Nixon famously had his enemies list, and he equally famously used, or attempted to use, the IRS to go after them. Much, in fact, in the manner that LBJ had used the same agency to go after Richard Nixon. And much in the manner that FDR had instructed the IRS, including its chief prosecutor, one Robert Jackson, to bring and prosecute criminal charges against Andrew Mellon, a former Secretary of the Treasury, for actions which Jackson informed Roosevelt were perfectly legal. But prosecute he did. Jackson, whom I used to admire before I read that little story (it’s one of the inter-twined plots in The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes, a marvelous book), and who ought to have been disbarred for what he did, instead was rewarded with a seat on the Supreme Court, from which post he took a leave of absence to go hang Nazis in Nuremberg. Go figure. 

Today’s IRS scandal is more unsettling because its actions were directed not at discrete individuals or organizations but at an entire swathe of the political spectrum. More to the point, the mechanism of the attack was a frontal assault on the practical ability of these groups to engage in political speech, which is the whole point of that part of the First Amendment. I mean, we don’t have a First Amendment so that people can dunk images of Jesus Christ in urine. We have a First Amendment so we can have True the Vote. The left has always been jealous of its hold on people like Geo. Soros and organizations like the New York Times. The Citizens United case blew a hole in that monopoly. If you can’t un-do that decision, you can at least turn it into a one-sided proposition. Despite the efforts of clowns like that feller from Minnesota (whose election victory bore unmistakable signs of pretty pervasive voter fraud), no one on the left seriously wants to toss a spanner into the ability of Comrade Soros and his like to pour millions of dollars onto the political scales. But what would make it even better is if you can intercept those unwashed bitter clingers from fly-over country in their efforts to take their $50 and $100 donations and get to what Geo. Soros can peel off his hip on any Saturday afternoon. 

In a wonderful movie, The Lives of Others, there’s a scene where the Stasi has just finished bugging the playwright’s apartment. The team’s leaving, and as the colonel is very carefully locking the door, the opposite door on the same floor’s landing opens behind him. A woman is standing there. The colonel turns and asks her if she’d like her son’s education to continue uninterrupted (and of course the colonel knows where and what he’s studying). He gives her to understand, in precisely so many words, that if she expects him to be permitted to carry on his education, she will forget everything she might have just seen or heard.

When trying to prevent voter fraud gets you repeated visits from not only the IRS but also the ATF and OSHA, when not only your political activities but your business livelihood is targeted, then folks, we’re at precisely the same point as depicted in that movie. 

Just imagine how delightful it will be when the same agency that came after the would-be conservative 501(c)(4) groups has access to all of your healthcare information. Do you really want to run that advertising campaign against Senator Dipstick? Just how badly does your brother need that lung transplant? You know, Mr. and Mrs. Murgatroyd, there are only so many experts in treating children with autism spectrum disorders. Not just everyone can be accommodated. Are you really that interested in the voter rolls of Dade County? 

So I think that, in the balance, it’s the IRS story that’s the one which genuinely has the potential to destroy what America was supposed to be about, when the committee of the Continental Congress (and oddly enough, in the past few days we observed the anniversary of that committee’s formation) was tasked to draft a declaration relative to the political relationship between the thirteen colonies and the British crown. 

What a three months it’s been.

So according to the just-released report, U.S. GDP “surged” to 2.7% during the third quarter.  Tyler Durden, over at Zero Hedge, takes a hard look at it.  As it turns out, the devil is in the details, and in the case of this particular report the devil is extra special evil this time around.

Some 70% of the U.S. economy is driven by consumers’ personal consumption.  How did that do, in terms of annual growth?  Oh . . . ummmm . . . that grew by a whacking 1.4% quarter-on-quarter (it had been expected to come in 1.9%, so it was actually 26% lower than expected on a quarter-on-quarter basis), and 0.99% annual (it had been expected at 1.42%, over 30% lower than expected), thereby accounting for 36% of the gross “growth” number.  That’s reassuring.  It gets better of course; it always does.  Fully two-thirds of the annualized growth was accounted for by government spending (not omitting to recall that at the federal level we’re inventing $0.40 of every dollar we spend out of thin air, that “money” coming 91% from “loans” from the Ben Bernanke’s Fed to the Treasury).  Another 30% was accounted for by inventory growth.  Errrmmmm . . . I’m no finance wizard, but when your inventories are ballooning it tells me you’re not selling.  When you’re not selling you’re not making money; in fact, if you’re like most businesses I’ve been exposed to your inventories are financed, either from your seller or from a third party (or some combination of both).  So my question is what proportion of that growth in inventory is going to turn out to be deadweight?  And CapEx, fixed investments, a decent measure of how businesses are intending to behave?  How did that do?  It accounted for all of 0.1% of the “growth.”

Durden predicts, “‘A stunning success,’ the administration sycophants would say.”  I don’t think we need both checking in with the NYT, WaPo, and Dear Leader’s other campaign operatives.  But let’s see what my dear lads over at the FAZ have to allow.  “America’s Economy Doubles Its Growth Rate” is the headline.  They note the upward revision from the Q3 estimate of 2.0%.  The also note that fixed investment has fallen, for the first time since last year.  To what does the FAZ attribute the growth?  Is there a mention that 67% of it is accounted for by government spending?  Well . . . actually, no.  The growth is attributed to increase in exports and residential construction.  They say nothing about the numbers reported in this article from Reuters, by which new-home sales are softening, as resales continue to grow, somewhat.

The FAZ reports rosy forecasts of 2.0% annual growth in 2013 and 2.8% in 2014.  Tyler Durden is not so confident.  We’ll see who turns out to be right.

Every chicken living to adulthood, or at least to an age sufficient to harvest, we must assume, is possessed of one (1) heart, and one (1) gizzard.  Neither more nor less.  There must therefore be one (1) of each in each chicken that is harvested.

So why, then, does, e.g. Perdue, put out packages of what they label “Chicken Gizzards and Hearts (mostly gizzards)”?  By the way, they’re being entirely truthful; those packages contain a dozen or more gizzards per heart.  This past Sunday I fried me us a mess of them — two whole packages, in fact — and in that two whole packages of chicken-gizzards-and-hearts-mostly-gizzards there were, count them: exactly zero hearts at all.  None.

I want to see some video of Perdue’s source farms.  I want to see what a whole shed of heartless chickens look likes.  Do they also come with no forearms on their wings?  I mean, when eating buffalo wings everyone wants the upper arm, because you can eat those with one hand (saving the other to grab your beer without smearing it up with buffalo wing sauce, naturally).  Seems if they can produce heartless chickens (although as a proposition of pure mathematics I must not exclude the hypothesis that each of their chickens in fact does have one (1) heart . . . but also has about thirteen (13) or so gizzards), they can work the upper arm gag as well.

I’m stumped.  Seems like the math would work differently.