Archive for September, 2009
This Is Your Brain on Torture
We’ve all heard the argument that a subject under torture—or whatever this week’s euphemism is—may begin fabricating whatever they believe the interrogator wants to hear just to get the agony to stop. Now neuroscientists are suggesting that inflicting too much pain and stress on a subject may not just induce them to lie; it may cause them to lose track of what’s true and false altogether:
Fact One: To recall information stored in the brain, you must activate a number of areas, especially the prefrontal cortex (site of intentionality) and hippocampus (the door to long-term memory storage). Fact Two: Stress such as that caused by torture releases the hormone cortisol, which can impair cognitive function, including that of the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus. Studies in which soldiers were subjected to stress in the form of food and sleep deprivation have found that it impaired their ability to recall personal memories and information, as this 2006 study reported. “Studies of extreme stress with Special Forces Soldiers have found that recall of previously-learned information was impaired after stress occurred,” notes O’Mara. “Water-boarding in particular is an extreme stressor and has the potential to elicit widespread stress-induced changes in the brain.”
Stress also releases catecholamines such as noradrenaline, which can enlarge the amygdale (structures involved in the processing of fear), also impairing memory and the ability to distinguish a true memory from a false or implanted one. Brain imaging of torture victims, as in this study, suggest why: torture triggers abnormal patterns of activation in the frontal and temporal lobes, impairing memory. Rather than a question triggering a (relatively) simple pattern of brain activation that leads to the stored memory of information that can answer the question, the question stimulates memories almost chaotically, without regard to their truthfulness.
In brief, the subject may lose genuine memories, and come to believe that their confabulations are authentic ones. The full literature review, from Trends in Cognitive Science, can be downloaded in PDF form here.
Taking Over Everything
“My critics say that I’m taking over every sector of the economy,” President Obama sighed to George Stephanopoulos during his Sunday media blitz.
Not every sector. Just
- health care
- energy
- local schools
- banks
- insurance companies
- automobile companies
- compensation at financial firms
- newspapers
- the internet
This president and his Ivy League advisers believe that they know how an economy should develop better than hundreds of millions of market participants spending their own money every day. That is what F. A. Hayek called the “fatal conceit,” the idea that smart people can design a real economy on the basis of their abstract ideas.
This is not quite socialism. In most of these cases, President Obama doesn’t propose to actually nationalize the means of production. (In the case of the automobile companies, he clearly did.) He just wants to use government money and government regulations to extend political control over all these sectors of the economy. And the more political control achieves, the more we can expect political favoritism, corruption, uneconomic decisions, and slower economic growth.
TLJ on Genachowski’s ‘Net Neutrality’ Speech
TechLawJournal is a consistently high-quality subscription service that provides news, records, and analysis of legislation, litigation, and regulation affecting the computer, Internet, communications and information technology sectors. It reported this morning on FCC chairman Julius Genachowski’s speech proposing to regulate the provision of Internet service. The TLJ piece includes background that I think might benefit Cato@Liberty readers wishing to understand the issues better, so I asked for and received permission to republish it here.
[TLJ Report after the jump]
Read the rest of this post »
What You Don’t Know Won’t Hurt You (Surveillance State Edition)
While there are many choice tidbits to relate from Tuesday’s hearings on PATRIOT Act reform at the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution—not least the fellow who had to be wrestled from the room, literally kicking and screaming, after he tried to stand and interrupt with a complaint about alleged FBI violations of his civil rights—I’ll just relate a novel theory of the Fourth Amendment advanced by Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa).
The ACLU’s Mike German, a former FBI agent turned surveillance policy expert, was explaining that it’s hard to know whether expansive surveillance powers are being abused, they’re mostly used in secret and deployed via third-parties like financial institutions and telecoms, who have little incentive to raise much fuss or draw attention to their cooperation. King interrupted to suggest that if we weren’t hearing about constitutional challenges, then it was probably safe to assume there was no Fourth Amendment harm. German tried to reiterate that the people whose privacy interests were directly harmed typically would not know they had ever been targeted.
That, King declared, was precisely the point. Surveillance of which the subject never became aware, he said, could be compared to a “tree falling in the forest” when nobody’s around. In other words, if you aren’t ultimately prosecuted, and don’t even feel subjective distress as a result of the knowledge that your private records or communications have been pored over, then it’s presumably no harm, no foul. If we take this line of thinking literally, sufficiently secret surveillance can never be unconstitutional, which would seem to make King a spiritual cousin of Richard “if the president does it, that means it’s not illegal” Nixon.
Americans Don’t Want It
“Americans are more likely today than in the recent past to believe that government is taking on too much responsibility for solving the nation’s problems and is over-regulating business,” according to a new Gallup Poll.
New Gallup data show that 57% of Americans say the government is trying to do too many things that should be left to businesses and individuals, and 45% say there is too much government regulation of business. Both reflect the highest such readings in more than a decade.
Byron York of the Examiner notes:
The last time the number of people who believe government is doing too much hit 57 percent was in October 1994, shortly before voters threw Democrats out of power in both the House and Senate. It continued to rise after that, hitting 60 percent in December 1995, before settling down in the later Clinton and Bush years.
Also, the number of people who say there is too much government regulation of business and industry has reached its highest point since Gallup began asking the question in 1993.
That might give an ambitious administration pause. The independents who swung the elections in 2006 and 2008 clearly think things have gone too far. An administration as smart as Bill Clinton’s will take the hint and rein it in. Meanwhile, another recent poll, by the Associated Press and the National Constitution Center, shows that
Americans decidedly oppose the government’s efforts to save struggling companies by taking ownership stakes even if failure of the businesses would cost jobs and harm the economy, a new poll shows.
The Associated Press-National Constitution Center poll of views on the Constitution found little support for the idea that the government had to save AIG, the world’s largest insurer, mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the iconic American company General Motors last year because they were too big to fail.
Just 38 percent of Americans favor government intervention – with 60 percent opposed – to keep a company in business to prevent harm to the economy. The number in favor drops to a third when jobs would be lost, without greater damage to the economy.
Similarly strong views showed up over whether the president should have more power at the expense of Congress and the courts, if doing so would help the economy. Three-fourths of Americans said no, up from two-thirds last year.
“It really does ratify how much Americans are against the federal government taking over private industry,” said Paul J. Lavrakas, a research psychologist and AP consultant who analyzed the results of the survey.
Note that 71 percent of the respondents opposed government takeovers, with 50 percent strongly opposed, before the “benefits” of such takeovers were presented.
President Obama is an eloquent spokesman for his agenda, and he has an excellent political team with a lot of outside allies to push it. But as the old advertising joke goes, you can have the best research and the best design and the best advertising for your dog food, but it won’t sell if the dogs don’t like it.
Congress to Lift the Travel Ban to Cuba?
Bloomberg News reports today that the U.S. House may pass a bill by the end of the year lifting the almost five-decade-old ban on travel to Cuba by American citizens. The step is long overdue. According to the article:
A group of House and Senate lawmakers proposed in March ending restrictions to allow all U.S. citizens and residents to travel to Cuba. [Rep. Sam Farr, a California Democrat] said the legislation, known as the “Freedom to Travel to Cuba Act,” also has enough votes to clear the Senate, where Senator Byron Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat, and Republican Senator Michael Enzi of Wyoming introduced the legislation.
As Rep. Farr succinctly added, “If you are a potato, you can get to Cuba very easily, but if you are a person, you can’t, and that is our problem.”
I rebut a lot of what Sen. Dorgan has said about free trade and globalization in my new book, Mad about Trade, but on the issue of the Cuban embargo and travel ban, Sen. Dorgan and most of his fellow Democrats are pushing in the right direction, while most Republicans still vote to maintain our failed policies. For more on why the travel ban and embargo should be lifted, read my speech at Rice University in 2005.
Here is one issue where those of use who support less government and more economic freedom really can hope for progressive change.
Robbing Peter to Pay Paul
The FDIC’s insurance fund, which it uses to pay off despositors in failed banks, is getting low. One way it can bolster its reserves is to draw on a $100 billion line of credit from the Treasury. Instead, however,
Senior regulators say they are seriously considering a plan to have the nation’s healthy banks lend billions of dollars to rescue the insurance fund that protects bank depositors. That would enable the fund, which is rapidly running out of money because of a wave of bank failures, to continue to rescue the sickest banks.
A brilliant scheme to avoid another taxpayer bailout? Not really.
The banks are willing to lend because the FDIC will pay them a good interest rate. Repayment is virtually guaranteed because the FDIC can always draw on its line of credit. Thus the banks are getting a better deal than they would in the marketplace (that’s why they are doing this), so the scheme is a backdoor way of further bailing out the banks.
Why go through this charade? Apparently, using the Treasury credit line
is said to be unpalatable to Sheila C. Bair, the agency chairwoman whose relations with the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, have been strained.
“Sheila Bair would take bamboo shoots under her nails before going to Tim Geithner and the Treasury for help,” said Camden R. Fine, president of the Independent Community Bankers. “She’d do just about anything before going there.”
Instead, the FDIC will con the taxpayers. The FDIC has no choice under existing policy, of course, but to pay off depositors of failing banks. They should just be honest about how who is paying for it.
Tuesday Links
- Richard Rahn on the growing debt bomb, set to explode within three years: “Expect to see record high real interest rates and/or inflation, coupled with a collapse of many ‘entitlements.’”
- Why right wing “czar mania” is a needless distraction.
- Obama says that “nobody” considers the government mandate to buy health care a tax. But here are a couple of Obama appointees who do.
- Let the battle of ideas begin: Economists debate the monetary lessons of the last recession.
- Podcast: “Muddling Missions in Afghanistan” featuring Malou Innocent. More on Afghanistan here.
You Don’t Have to Be a Czar, Baby, to Be in My Show
Raging against “czars” seems all but obligatory these days for movement conservatives. The proliferation of Obama administration czars means “a giant expansion of presidential power,” warns Karl Rove, former domestic policy czar for the Bush administration–which I suppose proves once again that the capacity for embarassment is a career liability in this town.
Conservatives ought to be concerned about the growth of executive power. But as I argue in my Washington Examiner column this week, “czars” are pretty far down any serious list of executive-power concerns:
conservatives’ current bout of czar mania elevates symbolism over substance. All the focus on a scary moniker for certain executive officials misses the real problem: Unconstitutional delegation of power to the executive branch. Whether those illegitimate powers are exercised by unconfirmed presidential advisers or the president himself is quite beside the point….
Often, czars are mere figureheads, appointed to signal concern over the latest hot-button issue. As one presidential scholar puts it, “when in doubt, create a czar.”
True, it’s problematic that some of these appointees aren’t vetted by the Senate, and that presidents claim czars don’t have to answer to Congress — as when the Bush administration asserted in 2002 that executive privilege shielded then-homeland security czar Tom Ridge from testifying on the Hill.
But as the Washington Independent’s Dave Weigel has pointed out, many of the “czars” who appear on the conservative target list already have to be confirmed by the Senate. Others don’t, but when Obama is hell-bent on taking over the health care sector — one-sixth of the U.S. economy — it’s bizarre to agonize over the allegedly unchecked power exercised by the likes of the AIDS and urban affairs czars.
Similarly, while it’s great to see a nutter like Van Jones denied a federal salary, few of those cheering Jones’ defenestration can coherently explain what the green jobs czar actually does, or the threat he was supposed to represent.
What, was Jones going to give 9/11 “Truthers” and black nationalists jobs weatherizing homes? Will we stop wasting money on such projects now that he’s gone?
More here.
Gruber on Whether Mandates Are Taxes
Yesterday, on PBS’s NewsHour, I debated MIT health economist Jonathan Gruber on (among other things) whether the individual mandate in President Obama’s health plan is a tax. As you can see in this video, Gruber pretty clearly states that the mandate is not a tax:
Which seems to conflict with what he wrote in his textbook:
Suppose…the government mandated that everyone buy full insurance at the average price of $825 per year…This would not be a very attractive plan to careful consumers, however, who could view themselves as essentially being taxed in order to support this market, by paying higher premiums than they should based on their risk.
There are really two government interventions at play in that example: the mandate that requires everyone to purchase insurance (whether they want it or not), and the price controls that force low-risk consumers to pay more than an actuarially fair premium. One could say that it is the price controls, rather than the mandate, that Gruber likens to a tax. It might be inconsistent, however, to suggest that when price controls force you to pay more for something than the market would charge, that is a tax, but when a mandate forces you to purchase something you don’t want at all, that’s not a tax.
Correction of the Day
A Sept. 18 Page One article about the community organizing group ACORN incorrectly said that a conservative journalist targeted the organization for hidden-camera videos partly because its voter-registration drives bring Latinos and African Americans to the polls. Although ACORN registers people mostly from those groups, the maker of the videos, James E. O’Keefe, did not specifically mention them.
What is Condoleezza Rice Talking About?
In an interview with Fortune Magazine, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says, “The last time we left Afghanistan, and we abandoned Pakistan, that territory became the very territory on which Al Qaeda trained and attacked us on September 11th.” She goes on to say, “So our national security interests are very much tied up in not letting Afghanistan fail again and become a safe haven for terrorists.” She declared, “It’s that simple, if you want another terrorist attack in the U.S., abandon Afghanistan.”
Actually, Ms. Rice, it’s not that simple. Your logic ignores the fact that terrorists can move to governed spaces. Rather than setting up in weak, ungoverned states, enemies can flourish in strong states because these countries have formally recognized governments with the sovereignty to reject foreign interference in their domestic affairs. This is one reason why terrorists find sanctuary across the border in Pakistan. Besides, 9/11 was planned in many other countries with competent law enforcement agencies, Germany and the United States included.
If there were (god forbid!) another 9/11, it would prove that invading and forcibly democratizing two Muslim-majority countries has not made America safer. In fact, if Ms. Rice is so concerned about abandoning Afghanistan, where was she in 2002 when her boss diverted America’s resources away from those who attacked us on 9/11 by invading a country that did not?
Americans should reject Ms. Rice’s atrocious interpretation of policy and remember that she and her ilk were adept at keeping the American public in an elevated state of panic. Fear-mongering should be rejected and replaced with a sober analysis of policy and its consequences.
Al Qaeda poses a manageable security problem, not an existential threat to America. Yet, as I mention here, policymakers tend to conflate al Qaeda with indigenous Pashtun-dominated militias. America’s security, however, will not be at risk even if an oppressive regime takes over a contiguous fraction of Afghan territory; and if the Taliban were to provide sanctuary to al Qaeda once again, it would be easier to strike at the group within Afghanistan than in neighboring, nuclear-armed Pakistan.
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