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.

Let’s get right to the obvious stuff. Last year, Maurice Sendak died shortly before his 84th birthday. Having been born in 1928, he would have been 85 today. He was an author and illustrator of what he refused to call children’s books. His best known book is Where the Wild Things Are though he wrote and (especially) illustrated loads more. Google created an excellent doodle that runs for a minute and 45 second for the occasion. Check it out.

The great French realist painter Gustave Courbet was born on this day in 1819. His self-portrait is one of the best I’ve ever seen. When anyone thinks of 19th century French paintings, they think of the Academic and Impressionist schools. And the Realist school fed into those two. But Courbet’s art has a nearly unhinged aspect to it that is especially compelling.

Andre Derain was born on this day in 1880. He founded Fauvism along with Henri Matisse. I’m very fond of this school of art (which should surprise no one). And I’m fond of Derain. But I’m more fond of Kees van Dongen. That’s probably just because he painted more pretty girls. I fully admit that Derain is the greater artist. He’s also greater than Matisse who mostly annoys me in my old age.

Art critic and really quite interesting painter Fairfield Porter was born in 1907. Blues singer Howlin’ Wolf was born in 1910. Here he is doing “Smokestack Lightning”:

One of my favorite writers when I was a kid (go figure), Saul Bellow was born in 1915.

French singer Patachou is 95 today. Controversial sociobiologist E. O. Wilson is 84. Celebrity lawyer F. Lee Bailey is 80. Much vilified politician John Edwards is 60. Human frailties aside, I think he would have made a better president than Obama or Clinton. It’s sad that unlike the Republican Party, the Democratic Party seems incapable of forgiveness. And speaking of Republicans, John “Torture Memo” Yoo is 46. The Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility found that he had committed professional misconduct and recommended that the Pennsylvania Bar discipline him. This was later blocked, of course. And Yoo continues to be a Berkeley Law School professor and to get good paying speaking engagements. Similarly, Bobby Jindal is 42. He’s noted for claiming that the Republicans should stop being the “stupid party” while going around every day acting as proof that it is.

The day, however, belongs to another of my endless list of crushes: Judy Garland who was born on this day back in 1922. What’s not to love? She was beautiful, talented, and unstable—the Holy Trinity for me! Here she is doing a song from the turn of the century, “I Don’t Care”:

Happy birthday Judy Garland!

America does not believe in democracy. Remember the 2006 Palestinian elections when Hamas won? There was a total administration freak out over that one. Democracy is only valid if people vote for what the United States government wants. That’s in the Constitution. Look it up!

For a decade and a half, the United States has claimed that Venezuela couldn’t possibly be a democracy. They voted for Hugo Chavez! We don’t like Chavez. Therefore, Venezuela is not a democracy. Q-fucking-D.

Well, now Chavez is gone. Unfortunately, those stupid Venezuelans blew it again! They voted for someone else that the United States doesn’t like: former Chavez vice-president Nicolas Maduro. Don’t these Venezuelans know how democracy works?

It turns out that they do; it is just that they have an old fashioned idea that democracy involves the will of the people and related institutions. In fact, they have a very good electronic voting system with a clear paper trail that allows for vote audits. And thus far, they have audited 53% of the 14 April 2013 election results. And guess what: Maduro won fair and square.[1]

Well, a group of 14 economists and statisticians mostly from the United States have had enough. In an open letter, they say that the audit “leaves no room for doubt about the result.” They’ve calculated the probability that the election results are wrong at one in 25 thousand trillion. Yet, “The State Department has called the outcome of the election into question, and refused to recognize the results.” And even worse, the mainstream media just follow along, giving the impression that somehow Maduro stole the election.

I understand that a lot of people in the United States didn’t like Chavez and don’t like Maduro. My colleague Michael J.W. Stickings at The Reaction is one. And even I think that Chavez could have done a lot more with the resources he had at his disposal. What is not open to question is that Venezuela is a democracy and that the 14 April 2013 election was a free and fair one.

The government of the United States has to accept that it can’t always get its way. Is it any wonder that the Republican Party won’t compromise on anything when the government itself takes the same approach to the rest of the world? Regardless of what we think, other countries have a right to manage their own affairs. And that is especially true when we prop up truly vile dictatorships only to scream about the outcomes of free and fair elections that don’t go the way we want.

[1] The election was fairly close. Maduro got 50.6% and Capriles got 49.1%. There was a post-election audit of a random sample of 53% of the votes. It found no irregularities, but Capriles refused to accept defeat. He demanded that all of the votes be recounted. Eventually, the election commission relented and agreed to recount the rest of the votes. After first being satisfied, Capriles rejected this and asked for complete access to the entire voting system. It ought to be clear that the only election result that Capriles will accept is one where he wins. And that goes for the United States as well.

How people continue to think that America is even moderately a meritocracy amazes me. Look at the banks. The Federal Reserve loans them money at low interest rates and allows them to lend it out at high interest rates. It would be like if Apple gave only you and your close friends the right to buy iPhones for ten bucks. You could then sell them for the going rate. You could not possibly lose money, right? Well, that’s what the Fed does for bankers because they are the “right” kind of people.

A similar thing is going on with the credit rating agencies. They are supposed to make sure that investing is sound. If they rate a bond as AAA, an investor should know that while the returns on that bond are poor, it is safe. But a big problem with the housing bubble was that banks were packaging a bunch of highly risky mortgages together and the the credit rating agencies dutifully rated them as safe investments—even AAA at times! When the financial crisis happened and all those ratings were shown to be dead wrong, the rating agencies just shrugged. “You can’t blame us,” they said. “It was just our opinion.” They make billions of dollars but aren’t accountable enough that their total failures even cause a ripple in their business models. S&P is supposed to make money because, you know, they are the “right” kind of people.

In 2011, around the time of the Debt Ceiling debacle, Standard & Poor’s (S&P) downgraded the federal government’s credit rating from AAA to AA+. That was the first time that this had ever happened. And for good reason. If the United States gets in a situation where it can’t pay its debts, it would mean that the entire world is struggling with Armageddon. So it wasn’t surprising that the S&P downgrade caused not the slightest blip in the borrowing costs of the United States. Apparently, companies are all for paying S&P and the other ratings agencies for legal cover. But actual investors knew that the S&P downgrade was meaningless.

Well, there’s big news out this morning. Standard & Poor’s has upgraded the federal government’s credit rating! Actually, its credit rating outlook. It is still AA+, but the outlook has changed from “negative” to “stable.” I’m sure that this will have as big an effect as the original downgrade. But something puzzles me. If S&P had this sub-credit rating tool, why didn’t they use it two years ago? Instead of downgrading us from AAA, they could have just changed our outlook to negative. That would have made the point without the embarrassment of demonstrating just how irrelevant the rating agencies are.

According to Politico:

This strikes me as very weak tea. If there was any real concern in 2011, it was the fact that the House Republicans were willing to cause a federal government default over the Debt Ceiling. Otherwise, our debt situation was fine. We still face a Debt Ceiling crisis at the end of the summer. And despite what many want to believe, it looks serious. There are many in the Republican Party who really do want to refuse to raise the limit. And the lack of crisis over the Fiscal Cliff and the Sequester has just made them think that fears of catastrophe are over blow. So S&P is just continuing on with their pretend analysis.

The United States is divided into the “right” kind of people and the “wrong” kind of people. The “right” kind of people are the rich. If a poor person manages to claw his way to become rich, well, that just shows that the system works. And that is why for the last 35 years the rich have systematically made it harder and harder for the poor to do just that. At the same time, they’ve made it almost trivial for the “right” kind of people to get even richer on the backs of the “wrong” kind of people. And today we see another example of the “right” kind of people getting paid for useless analysis. If you invest based upon their advice, you are the “wrong” kind of people. The caste system is alive and well in America!

Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) published a good article on Bill O’Reilly’s “evolution” on one part of the IRS scandal. As you may recall, the Daily Caller published an article in which they claimed that former IRS Chief Douglas Shulman visited the White House 157 times while Obama was president. It took about a day for Garance Franke-Ruta of The Atlantic to write, The Fake Story About the IRS Commissioner and the White House. In it, she explained that those 157 times were not actual visits of Shulman to the White House, but just times that Shulman had been provided with clearance by the Secret Service to come to mostly standing meetings. As far as we can tell, that was 11 times. Shulman visited the White House compound (not usually the White House itself) 11 times. He only met with Obama twice and both those times were with a large group of people.

Let’s look at the timeline:

29 May

The Daily Caller article appears.

30 May

Bill O’Reilly reports, “This man former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman visited the White House—ready—157 times. Incredible.”

31 May

The Atlantic corrects the Daily Caller article.

3 June

Bill O’Reilly reports, “So far, we have been dead on. Last week we told you that former IRS Chief Douglas Shulman visited the White House 157 times, far more than any other department head.”

4 June

Bill O’Reilly reports, “How about the Shulman guy with 157 visits?”

5 June

On The Factor, guest Kirsten Powers tries to inject a little fact into the discussion, saying, “The number of times he actually showed up is something like 11, I think.” O’Reilly corrects her, “Oh that’s—that’s false. We don’t know that. He was cleared in 157 times.”

Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner! Savor this moment, because this is the closest we ever get to a correction or apology from Bill O’Reilly. He’s right: we don’t know that he was only at the White House compound 11 times. He could have been there more. Not a lot more. And certainly nothing like 157 times, as O’Reilly keeps saying. But we don’t know that he was there only only 11 times. Bill O’Reilly likes to get his facts straight if they counter his ridiculously false claims.

I think of Mike Konczal as an economics writer, but he is usually just as illuminating when writing about other things. Yesterday at Wonk Blog, he wrote, Is a Democratic Surveillance State Possible? In it, he described work by Yale law professor Jack Balkin where he argues that there are two kinds of surveillance states: authoritarian and democratic. Of course, in the United States, we have the authoritarian kind. And that is perhaps understandable. It matches our pretend democracy.

Authoritarian surveillance states act as gluttons and misers of information. They are gluttons in the sense that they collect all the information they can without regard to content or source. As Konczal puts it, “More is always better, indiscriminate access is better than targeted responses, and there’s a general presumption that they’ll have access to whatever they want, at any time.” But they are misers in that they want as little information as possible to get out about who they are and what they do. In other words, authoritarian surveillance wants ultimate power and no accountability or transparency.

Democratic surveillance states, on the other hand, are, “information gourmets and information philanthropists.” They are highly selective about the information they collect and generous about what they are doing and for what purpose. Konczal points out that a big part of this would be information destruction. That’s one thing you can count on: the government might, for example, take your finger prints to identify you. But they will use those fingerprints even after you die to accuse you of crime. The information just goes on and on. In the case of fingerprints, it probably makes sense. But does it make sense for the NSA to maintain all of my phone records until the end of time? I assure you that they think so.

The worst part of all this is that we know that we can’t trust the courts. As I reported earlier this year, FISA just acts as a pass-through filter for the surveillance state. Over 32 years, the FISA courts got 38,093 requests for secret monitoring and they denied just 11 of those requests. That means they approved more 99.97% of those requests. Great oversight guys! Konczal notes:

Clearly, we need to move toward a democratic surveillance state. Actually, I’m even more liberal (Libertarian!) than that. I think most of our secret services are unnecessary. Just like with our imperial guard all over the world, they aren’t there to make us safer. They are there to keep the rich and powerful rich and powerful. But I understand that few people think like I do. So the least we can do (the least) is to limit the scope of the surveillance state and make it transparent so that we know in a general sense what it is doing.

Afterword

Today at Wonk Blog, Timothy B. Lee asks, Has the US Become the Type of Nation from Which You Have to Seek Asylum? This is in reference to Edward Snowden, the NSA surveillance leaker who is in Hong Kong trying to get political asylum from the United States. He sums up:

That’s an understatement. All indications are that someone like Snowden would be treated quite unfairly by the American “justice” system. Can you say John Kiriakou?

On this day back in 1812, the discoverer of Neptune, Johann Gottfried Galle was born. By “discoverer” I mean that he was the first person to see it and know what it was. The planet was already theorized and Urbain Le Verrier had predicted roughly where it would be. Still, Galle’s achievement is notable.

The founder of the Repository for Germinal Choice, Robert Klark Graham was born in 1906. Very creepy eugenics stuff. Iron artisan Philip Simmons was born in 1912. Guitar legend Les Paul was born in 1915. The longest serving Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara was born in 1916. Although he came to regret the Vietnam War, he was one of its principle architects. Still, there were larger social forces working. McNamara was not an evil man like Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld.

The late great rhythm and blues singer Johnny Ace was born in 1929. He wasn’t bad at all. His biggest song was Pledging My Love. But he is best know for his death. He was playing around with a .22 caliber revolver while drunk. And he accidentally shot and killed himself. He was 25.

Contemporary of Jacques Brel, the French chanson singer-songwriter Barbara (Monique Andree Serf) was born in 1930. Here she is doing “Le Bel Age” about her affair with a beautiful young man:

And Jackie Wilson was born in 1934. Here he is doing “Higher and Higher”:

Writer of the novel The Graduate, Charles Webb is 74 today. Film composer James Newton Howard is 62. Crummy but popular crime novelist Patricia Cornwell is 57. Michael J. Fox and Johnny Depp is the big five-oh. Natalie Portman is 32. And “Egg” from Arrested Development, Mae Whitman is 25.

The day, however, belongs to the great songwriter Cole Porter who was born on this day in 1891. He wrote so many great pop songs, they are hard to list. So I’m not even going to try. Here is Frank Sinatra doing one of them, “I’ve Got You Under My Skin”:

Happy birthday Cole Porter!