Before we get to the birthdays, we need to discuss a death. Early in the morning 50 years ago today, civil rights leader Medgar Evers was assassinated by white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith. But that was not the first attempt on his life. Others had tried to run him over and fire bomb him. It is shocking that to this day he isn’t widely known outside the civil rights movement. In fact, Emmett Till is far better than known than he is, even though Evers was so important in getting out the story of Till’s torture and murder. But there can be no doubt of just how important and effective Medgar Evers was. Just look at the reaction he got from the Mississippi bigots.

Evers was shockingly young when he died: just under 38 years old. To provide a little context, his older brother (Republican civil rights spokesman) Charles Evers is soon to turn 91. So it is very possible that Medgar would still be with us. Meanwhile, his murderer, Beckwith, lived to be 80. He only spent 6 years in jail for the crime because it took 31 years to convict him when he was already 73 years old. Before that, he had been caught trying to plant a bomb at the home of a leader of the Anti-Defamation League. He was convicted of “transporting explosives without a permit.” What a justice system we have!

Here is this morning’s Democracy Now! segment on Medgar Evers:

On this day in 1929, Anne Frank was born. I think the enduring appeal of her diary is that it shows that life will go on regardless. There is a similar scene in Schindler’s List where a couple are getting married in the camp. Even when suffocated by evil, people still manage to hope.

The chess player Donald Byrne was born in 1930. He is best known for losing the so called “game of the century” to Bobby Fischer. I’ve always thought he showed very good sportsmanship for playing the game through long after he knew he had lost. Mostly, he underestimated the 13-year-old chess genius. The game is known for an amazing queen sacrifice by Fischer, but other than that, it isn’t that interesting a game. Fischer conspicuously ignored it in his My 60 Memorable Games. Byrne was a Master level player—one of the best Americans during his peak. In 1955, for example, while playing black, he beat one of the chess icons of the 20th century Efim Geller. Byrne was also an English professor. He died of lupus at the age of 45.

Geroge H. W. Bush is 89 today. I give him another year to live. He doesn’t look too good, but I figure he will make it to 90 and then move on to the undiscovered country. I think the same thing about Bob Dole. But he hits 90 next month, so don’t be surprised if he soon decides it’s just too embarrassing to continue to be a Republican icon in the modern world.

Jim Nabors is 83 today. I hope that married life is working out for him. I suspect that it is. Musician Chick Corea is 72. And John Linnell, of They Might Be Giants fame, and Scott Thompson, of Kids in the Hall fame, are both 54 today.

Out of respect for Medgar Evers, no one “wins” today.

This morning at the Plum Line (which is no longer free), Greg Sargent reported on Holding Dems Who Vote Wrong Way on Guns Accountable. It explained that Michael Bloomberg has sent out a letter to Wall Street fat cats telling them not to give money to four red state Democratic Senators who voted against the Manchin-Toomey background check bill. It is not altogether clear where Sargent stands on this move by Bloomberg, but he provided only the last paragraph to argue against the move and then pretty weakly.

To a large extent, this makes me angry because of my priorities. Economics is what most matters to me and Michael Bloomberg is very much the enemy. And this little move of his might please a very small part of me, but its bigger effect will be to help Republicans win. And on economic issues, those Republicans agree with Michael Bloomberg. I doubt that is his specific intent. But it certainly doesn’t hurt that he will be switching out a Democrat who disagrees with him on guns and the economy for a Republican who only disagrees about guns. Why New Yorkers think that Bloomberg is on their side, I will never know. I also don’t know why he calls himself an “independent.” He is a typical blue state Republican: liberalish on social issues and that is all.

Just on the merits, this “kill off the conservative Democrats” is a bad strategy. It does nothing to increase the pro-gun reform movement. In fact, it may do the opposite. By lowering the competitiveness of Democrats in red states, it weakens the environment in which people can discuss gun law reform.

What we all need to remember is that gun reform is a single issue. Michael Bloomberg is not a Democrat. Other than a couple of issues, he is very much against the liberal project. There are plenty of gun reform groups one could support that don’t have a vested interest in getting Republicans elected by default. Look, I have no love for blue state Democrats either. But the truth is that on the vast majority of issues, they go along with the party. If voting against largely symbolic gun reform bills is what it takes for them to stay in office, I’m all for it. And so should be any Democrat, or even any left-leaning person.

And there is another part of the whole Michael Bloomberg circus that I hate. It shows that just because he has a lot of money, he can cause great harm to the democratic process. He doesn’t care if he destroys the Democratic Party or even the whole country as long as he gets his way on his pet issue. Sargent wrote, “They view this as a battle that could take many years to win and will require a major shift in basic thinking about gun politics among many top Democrats.” Why the focus on Democrats? This reminds me of David Frum’s ridiculous argument that we should vote for Romney because the Republicans would just continue to misbehave if Obama were re-elected. In this case, Bloomberg is saying that the Republicans are just wacko. So let’s reward them by attacking Democrats.

Michael Bloomberg is an evil and dangerous man.

This morning, Dylan Matthews at Wonk Blog (which is no longer free) explained, No, Edward Snowden Probably Didn’t Commit Treason. You see, Dianne Feinstein isn’t the only high profile idiot saying—based upon no evidence, I might add—that Snowden is a traitor. But it turns out that treason is a very specific legal construct that is hard to meet.

Basically, in order to commit treason, an individual must either go to war against the United States or must help a country that is at war with the United States. That clearly doesn’t include Snowden. In fact, it didn’t even include Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. We weren’t at war with the Soviet Union, so no treason for them.

There is even a question as to whether we are at war with al Qaeda. Of course, there is no question that our lapdog judiciary would see it that way. And that is what most concerns me about all this talk of treason. Even under the worst case scenario, Snowden is not a traitor. But as we’ve seen time and time again, the government has no problem stretching the law to unbelievable lengths in order to justify all of its vile acts. Just look at how the Obama administration has used the Espionage Act of 1917 to go after leakers. John Kiriakou was charged with three counts of violating it because he blew the whistle on our torture program. Go team!

In the end, I’m sure the government will go after Snowden under the Espionage Act too. But the truth is that it could go after him under the treason clause of the Constitution. And that should really concern us. At this point, the law is just a play thing for the government. If the government doesn’t like what you’ve done or what you’re doing, it will come after you. And there is nothing you can do about it. Kiriakou is a good example. In the end, all of the threats of the Espionage Act and even “making false statements” were dropped. But they still got him. He’s still going to spend two and a half years in jail.

So I don’t think Feinstein and friends really think that Edward Snowden is guilty of treason, except maybe in the colloquial sense (although that’s bad enough). They are just laying more of a foundation for further destruction of our civil rights. King George III: 1; American Revolutionaries: 0.

Italian Baroque composer Giovanni Antonio Giay was born on this day in 1690. And Portuguese Baroque composer Carlos Seixas was born in 1704. English Romantic painter John Constable was born in 1776. Photographic innovator Julia Margaret Cameron was born in 1815. Refrigeration technology inventor Carl von Linde was born in 1842.

On this day in 1864, the great composer Richard Strauss was born. Since I was a kid, I’ve been most interested in him not for his music but for his life. His only son Franz married a Jewish woman. He spent much of the late 30s and early 40s trying to protect his daughter-in-law and grandsons. And he was successful. But it did require him to associate with the Nazi regime in ways that disgusted him. Here is Also sprach Zarathustra, which Joseph Goebbels thought decadent, performed by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra:

The man who moved his family’s textile company into automobiles, Kiichiro Toyoda was born in 1894. Jacques Cousteau was born in 1910. And one of the few football coaches I could name, Vince Lombardi was born in 1913.

Gene Wilder is 80 today. I doubt that Mel Brooks should have gotten screenwriting credit for Young Frankenstein. As far as I can tell, Wilder conceived and wrote the whole thing and Brooks acted the way directors normally do in the development of scripts. Much the same thing can be said of Blazing Saddles, where Brooks took top credit for screenwriting and put “Story by Andrew Bergman” in tiny letters. I think everyone knows that Bergman is a comic genius because of his later career, but few even know that Wilder wrote Young Frankenstein and is singularly responsible for its best scene:[1]

One of the few football players I could name, Joe Montana is 57. The great comedian Hugh Laurie is 54. Here he is with Stephen Fry doing their brilliant skit about the privatization of the police force:

And actor Peter Dinklage is 44.

The day, however, belongs to the great magician Dai Vernon who was born on this day in 1894. He had an enormous influence on close-up magic over the last century (he lived to be 98). But unlike too much of the magic fraternity, he wasn’t obsessed with getting credit for ever little thing he did. Magic, I’m afraid, is like academic politics: fierce because the stakes are so low. So in that environment, Vernon was refreshingly pleasant. And brilliant. Here is something amazing: 26 seconds of him doing the slow motion card vanish as a young man:

Happy birthday Dai Vernon!

[1] Yes, I really do hate Mel Brooks. I think he’s an awful human being. But if he had done any decent work after Young Frankenstein, I would be more forgiving.

I am not much of a drinker. But I really hate the modern abstinence movement that is best represented by MADD. And look: I understand! The negative effects of alcohol are big and obvious. I don’t even much think of drunk driving. Alcohol makes a lot of people total assholes. But here’s the thing. Americans are far more responsible drinkers than they’ve ever been. And what has our society done as a result: become more and more hysterical about the evils of the devil’s brew.

Do I really mean that MADD is an abstinence movement? Yes! MADD lobbied to have the legal alcohol level be reduced from 0.12 to 0.08. I’m not necessarily against that, although I think it is madness to say that a blood alcohol content (BAC) alone really tells much about how fit someone is to drive. But the point is that the moment that MADD got the BAC level reduced to 0.08, it immediately started lobbying to have the new number reduced to 0.04. I’m not a big believer in slippery slopes, but I have no doubt that MADD would not be happy with the 0.04 level if they got it. It would soon be 0.02 and then zero tolerance.

What’s more, MADD has been very deceptive in pushing for their policies. A great one is to get a group of non-drinkers together. They then have them drink a glass of wine and ask them, “Would you feel comfortable driving in this state?” The answer is almost always no. And then they tell the people, well, you’re BAC is less than 0.04! I try to have a glass of wine each night and I agree: I’m not fit to drive after I’ve had a glass of wine. That’s because, I’m a lightweight. People who drink more than I do are not incapacitated at that level.

Along these lines, Sarah Kliff reported this afternoon on a new study (pdf) that found—Brace yourself!—designated drivers sometimes have a drink. The results are supposed to be shocking, but I found them rather encouraging. For starters, you need to know that the study was conducted with twenty-somethings in college bars. Yet the study found that 65% of designated drivers had had no alcohol at all. To me, that’s the headline. I never would have thought that this group would be that responsible. That result really cheers me up!

In addition, 82% were below 0.05 BAC—also known as well below the legal limit. And the kicker is that even among the 18% who had a BAC above 0.05, the median was only 0.08. (The average was higher, indicated that some were clearly drunk.) So even among the most irresponsible, there was a level of responsibility. What’s more: I want to know how their friends tested. Is a designated driver BAC of 0.08 optimal? Of course not. But if he (it is usually he) is driving around comrades who test at 0.22, that’s a good thing, is it not?

But the paper’s conclusion is just the opposite of this, “These findings identify the need for consensus across researcher, layperson, and communication campaigns that a DD must be someone who has abstained from drinking entirely.” Really?! That strikes me as an awfully moralistic conclusion for a scientific paper. Although it is typical of the drug treatment community that thinks that anything but perfection is failure. And this has a pernicious effect on society. I always encourage people who are having trouble quitting smoking to try just to reduce their smoking. It really isn’t the case that one cigarette or 40 is the same. But talking to these fools, you get the idea that it is.

Kliff’s headline is typical of the kind of hysteria that the abstinence movement is pushing: “Go Home Designated Drivers; You’re Drunk.” But of course, that is not what the study showed at all. It showed that a very strong majority of designated drivers were not drinking at all. And it showed that 91% of them were at or below the legal limit. Clearly, some of the designated drivers were confused about their jobs. But this isn’t something that deserves hysteria: “Study shows 9% of a collection of people known to be irresponsible are in fact irresponsible.” Alert the press! Oops. They already did.

Afterword

The data were collected between 10:00 pm and 2:30 am. This is important, because this shows that the results do indicate a worst case scenario. These are the more serious drinkers—again, the people you would think would be more irresponsible. But if I were being completely fair, the headline ought to have been, “Most designated drivers do excellent job; some do not.”

It’s hard to know what to think about Edward Snowden, the young man who leaked NSA information to the Guardian and the Washington Post. On the surface, it is all good and he looks like a hero. But I will admit that the story seems a little weird and so I will wait for more information. What can’t be questioned is that the documents leaked should have been leaked. The American public have a right to know about this stuff.

We’ve come a long way from where we started in this matter. It used to be that the government didn’t want newspapers to print troop movements. Now, the government doesn’t want newspapers to print that there is even a war. The dust up over Snowden’s revelations makes no sense. On the one hand we hear that he is a traitor who put American lives in danger. And on the other hand we hear that we already knew this was going on. This, of course, is what we heard about Bradley Manning, “This doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know—and it’s dangerous!”

Last night, The Hill reported that my very own United States Senator Dianne Feinstein thinks that Snowden is a traitor. On the most basic level, this is absurd. Just as I won’t say that he is a hero, she can’t know he is a traitor. But in her tiny mind he’s a traitor because he broke the law. She said, “He violated the oath, he violated the law. It’s treason.” Let’s just step back and think about it for a moment. Ever since the Nuremberg Trials, we have supposedly know that there are some orders—some laws—that should not be followed. My question for Ms. Feinstein is, “If the law said you should kill 6 million Jews, would you?”

Unfortunately, this kind of thinking is typical of our elected officials. I think of this as the 5-year-old approach to justice: it is always wrong to lie; it is always wrong to fight; it is always wrong to break the law. Of course, Feinstein is all for complexity when it comes to defending her authoritarian approach to the surveillance state. Why do we need it? She’ll tell you it is because it saves lives. But she can’t show you the lives that it saved. Because that might cost lives. I’m serious! She says that she’d be all for accountability, “Here’s the rub: the instances where this has produced good—has disrupted plots, prevented terrorist attacks, is all classified, that’s what’s so hard about this.”

Actually, it isn’t hard at all. As Scalia said, “I’ll bet you, if you conducted a lot of unreasonable searches and seizures, you’d get more convictions too.” The question is not whether having a member of the NSA follow each of us everywhere we go wouldn’t make us safer in the sense of fewer terrorist attacks. The question is whether the trade off is worth it. Clearly, Feinstein thinks the current actions of the NSA are worth it. I think they aren’t. I think it is worth talking about. Without Snowden we couldn’t even do that. Even with him it looks like we can’t.

Treason is a funny thing. When Feinstein was elected to Congress, she took an oath to uphold the Constitution. As the chair of the Select Committee on Intelligence, she has not only allowed the government to infringe on my constitutional rights, she has cheered it on. Who’s the real traitor?

Update (11 June 2013 10:03 am)

I just wrote to Feinstein:

Last night, I had my bedroom window open because even with the recent cooling, the room gets little circulation and stays very hot very late. So I was suddenly awaken at around 2:00 am, when a lightning storm rolled in. It was very cool with nothing between me and it. As I watched the storm and listened to thunder, half asleep, I remembered something I was told as a kid. “Every second between a lightning strike and the sound of its thunder represents a mile that the lightning is away from you.” So by this rule, if there is three seconds between the lightning and the thunder, the strike was three miles away.

That woke me up, because I knew it was wrong. Let’s go through this. A lightning strike causes sound and light to emanate from its location. The speed of light is so fast that it basically reaches our eyes instantaneously. But sound takes a little time. The amount of time it takes the thunder to reach us is the amount of time it takes sound to move from the origin of the lightning strike to us. That’s all very simple.

But that “one second equals mile rule” implies that sound travels at a speed of one second per one mile. And I certainly would have noticed that somewhere along the line. And I didn’t. What I remembered was that the speed of sound here at the surface of the earth is roughly 340 m/s. Why did I remember that? I have no idea. There are all kinds of bits of knowledge like that float around in my head—knowledge so useless you can’t even use it on Jeopardy! Anyway, that’s equal to roughly 0.2 miles per second.

So the rule is: for every 5 seconds, the strike was one mile away. Or, for my friends outside America: for every 3 seconds, the strike was one kilometer away. Except in China where the speed of sound is mandated to be much faster.