Tag: news

• Twitter’s
  initial public offering today is a far cry from Facebook’s
  first-day disaster. It initially offered stocks at $26 a share, but
  its first trade came in at more than $45 a share.
• Wondering why telecom companies aren’t objecting to handing
  over data to the feds? Money, of course. The CIA is paying AT&T
  more than
  $10 million a year for their assistance.
• 250,000 Colorado residents will
  lose their current insurance coverage thanks to Obamacare.
• Toronto Mayor Rob Ford continues his public transformation
  character into a Saturday Night Live character with a
  
  hilarious but also angry and violent rant that was secretly
  recorded and recently distributed.
• Fearing (probably correctly) that New York City’s new mayor
  will drop the appeals against the implementation of stop-and-frisk
  reforms,
  police unions are asking permission to intervene and keep the
  challenge going.
• Iranian officials say they’re being offered some relief from
  their
  crippling sanctions from Europe and America for their
  cooperation with efforts to scale back the country’s nuclear
  ambitions.

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Balaji Srinivasan, a Stanford Universty
instructor and genomics entrepreneur, recently offered some
radically individualistic advice to aspiring tech innovators. He
warned that, despite (or maybe, because of) the liberating and
enriching qualities of technology in people’s lives, the tech
industry faces a backlash from old-line power centers. In response,
he said, technological innovators should publicly argue their case,
but also be prepared to exploit a market opportunity to help people
escape government control, no matter the law. In other words, to
hell with arguing for more freedom, let’s take it. That’s good
advice for all of us, writes J.D. Tuccille, if we can break with
old attitudes and embrace a willingness to defy authority.

View this article.

As we approach the 50th
anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s death, Karlyn Bowman and Andrew
Rugg of the American Enterprise Institute have pulled together a

very useful paper on the popularity of various conspiracy
theories over the last five decades. The authors assembled every
poll they could find since 1963 on the JFK, RFK, and MLK
assassinations, the Pearl Harbor and 9/11 attacks, Roswell,
Oklahoma City, and more — all sorts of conspiracy stories, from
the plausible (a Waco cover-up, Iraq war lies) to the loopy
(Holocaust denial, moon landing denial). For many of the topics,
several polls have been conducted over the years, allowing the
reader to track a theory’s popularity over time.

It’s a great resource, and it includes several surveys I’ve
never seen before. (I wish I’d had it at hand when I was writing my

book about America’s conspiracy folklore.) It is also
refreshingly reluctant to draw sweeping conclusions about
conspiracy believers. “We don’t find compelling evidence from the
data in this document that particular demographic groups are
susceptible to a belief in conspiracy theories,” Bowman and Rugg
write. “It depends on the theory. Middle-aged Americans are more
likely to believe in the JFK assassination conspiracy than older or
younger ones. Young people and Democrats are most likely to
subscribe to conspiracy theories about 9/11. Women are more likely
to believe foul play was involved in Princess Diana’s death. While
the demographic data presented here are by no means exhaustive,
we’re hesitant to endorse what much of the literature concludes —
that the young and less educated are more prone to conspiratorial
instincts.”

The institute also produced a short video to release alongside
the paper. I have a few cameos in it:

Wes Benedict, the longtime Texas Libertarian Party man and
current executive director of the Libertarian National Committee,
who founded the Libertarian Booster PAC, responds
in a statement today to accusations floating around the
right-wing world that his PAC only supported Robert Sarvis’s LP
campaign for governor of Virginia as a tool of moneyed Democratic
Party interests, specifically donor Joe Liemandt (who has
also given six figures to the Obama campaign in 2012)

Says Benedict:

I realize that, no matter what I say, paranoid right-wingers
will think I’m a sneaky operative trying to help Democrats beat
Republicans. This message is for the rational people out there.

I founded the Texas-based Libertarian Booster PAC in late 2011.
Its purpose was to recruit and assist Libertarian Party candidates
for public office. You can read more
about it here.

In 2012, the PAC focused solely on non-federal races in Texas.
With satisfactory accomplishments, and no partisan election
happening in Texas in 2013, I looked to expand to other states
where permitted by law. Virginia was one of two states with a
gubernatorial election in 2013 plus state legislative elections, so
it was an obvious choice.

Back at the end of 2008, a man contacted me expressing interest
in the Libertarian Party. It turned out he was a successful
high-tech entrepreneur. One of his comments was along the lines of,
“What could the Libertarian Party do if it had a million dollars?”
Naturally, I contact this man whenever I think I have a good idea
that needs funding.

I’ve raised $300,000 from this donor for the Libertarian Booster
PAC. He has provided very little in the way of instruction or
advice regarding use of the money….

It was my idea, and my decision, to have the Libertarian Booster
PAC help recruit Libertarian Party candidates in 2013 in
Virginia. I
even advertised about it in February.

According to The Blaze, “[Rush] Limbaugh said the
Democrats enlisted a ‘fake Libertarian candidate’ who was ‘bought
and paid for by an Obama bundler.'” That’s an outright lie, and
Limbaugh should retract his claim.

My strategies and tactics have never been secret. They are
common strategies in the Libertarian Party, and they are the same
strategies promoted at the founding of the Libertarian Party. I try
to publicize them any way I can. I’ve even written a book about
them and included a chapter about PACs.

I want Libertarians to win elections. But I also want them to
run for office even when they’re unlikely to win. Why? To get the
public to discuss and consider libertarian principles…

The total amount the Libertarian Booster PAC gave to Sarvis’
campaign was barely
over $11 thousand, by the way. Sarvis freely discussed the
PAC’s role in helping him get on the ballot in
my October interview with him, hardly a good idea if that was
the key to revealing he was some sort of Democratic plant all
along.

Benedict points out that:

If I wanted to hurt the Republican in Virginia, I would have
supported a right-wing candidate who sounded like a Tea Partier —
who only talked about cutting welfare, Obamacare, and how bad
Democrats are. I would never have helped someone like Robert
Sarvis, who talked a lot about social issues that appeal to liberal
voters. As it turned out, polls show that if Sarvis weren’t in the
race, McAuliffe would probably have won by a slightly bigger
margin.

I’ll be writing more extensively about the Sarvis campaign
and its meaning for libertarianism and Libertarianism in American
politics moving forward here next week.

The school board in East Hampton, New York
says it didn’t hear any complaints it took in the three weeks to
get from an idea by a parent concerned about drugs at the local
high school to the school board voting unanimously to bring drug
dogs into the building.
Via the East Hampton Star:

A packed house of parents sat close together, speaking
as one in favor of the proposal.

“I speak in support of this policy, as a taxpayer and parent of a
young child in the district,” said Jeff Erickson. “I applaud the
board. We all know that we have an epidemic on Long Island with
oxycodone and prescription-drug use. It starts with alcohol and
marijuana. If we have children using our facility to sell drugs or
use drugs, let’s get rid of them. Let’s get them out, because
they’re poisoning our children.”

Mr. Erickson continued: “I’m pretty conservative on this. I have no
problem with them sniffing our children.”

Thunderous applause followed his remarks.

“We have not heard one word against — not one,” said Patricia Hope,
the board president, yesterday morning.

One parent suggested the dogs do the cars in the parking lot,
too. No word on what the teachers union might say about that. The
principal of the high school says the building would go on
“modified lockdown” during surprise visits by the county sheriff’s
K-9 unit, and local police would be called if drugs were found.

Read Jacob Sullum’s March Reason piece on how police use drug
dogs to manufacuter probable cause
here. Schools need only “reasonable suspicion” to conduct
searches, the Supreme Court explained in a 2009 decision about a
middle school girl strip searched over an Advil, which you can read
Sullum on here.