Author: Tom Sullivan

Peek-a-boo, we spy you … again
by Tom Sullivan

Via a 2011 slide presentation leaked by Edward Snowden, The Intercept provides more details on how spy agencies are “building haystacks to search for needles.” By intercepting unencrypted data relayed from smartphone ads and apps to analytics firms and advertisers, British and Canadian spy agencies can compile detailed profiles of individual smart phone users. Advertisers typically collect this information to answer usage questions:

How often does a particular user open the app, and at what time of day? Where does the user live? Where does the user work? Where is the user right now? What’s the phone’s unique identifier? What version of Android or iOS is the device running? What’s the user’s IP address?

But since the data sent from apps is often unencrypted, it represents “a major privacy threat” exploitable by spy agencies. This particular spy program was/is code-named BADASS:

Analysts are able to write BADASS “rules” that look for specific types of tracking information as it travels across the internet.

For example, when someone opens an app that loads an ad, their phone normally sends an unencrypted web request (called an HTTP request) to the ad network’s servers. If this request gets intercepted by spy agencies and fed into the BADASS program, it then gets filtered through each rule to see if one applies to the request. If it finds a match, BADASS can then automatically pull out the juicy information.

And those privacy policies?

Companies that collect usage statistics about software often insist that the data is anonymous because they don’t include identifying information such as names, phone numbers, and email addresses of the users that they’re tracking. But in reality, sending unique device identifiers, IP addresses, IMEI numbers [a unique device identifier], and GPS coordinates of devices is far from anonymous.

In one slide, the phrase “anonymous usage statistics” appears in conspicuous quotation marks. The spies are well aware that despite not including specific types of information, the data they collect from leaky smartphone apps is enough for them to uniquely identify their targets.

It’s going to be tough on screenwriters for Hollywood spy thrillers. How are we suspend our disbelief when what used to be the stuff of fiction no longer is? At the end of the spy comedy, The President’s Analyst, androids from the shadowy TPC have the entire world under surveillance. In 1967, that knock on The Phone Company was a joke.

Maybe night vision goggles?
by Tom Sullivan

The voter fraud frauds are at it again:

LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — Supporters and opponents of a Nebraska voter identification bill packed a public hearing Friday for a fierce debate over the measure.

The Legislature’s Government, Military and Veterans Affairs Committee heard heated arguments on a bill by Sen. Tyson Larson of O’Neill. The legislation would require voters to show a driver’s license or state identification card at a polling place. Fifteen other states have such a law.

[snip]

Doug Kagan of Nebraska Taxpayers for Freedom testified in support of the measure, saying it protects the sanctity of the system and compared voter ID laws to a vaccination preventing polio.

Because America’s Most Sanctimonious don’t want their elections tainted by diseased Others — infected with too much poor, too much melanin, or too much not-one-of-us.

Talking with a newly minted ex-Republican over the weekend, I recounted attending a 2013 “boot camp” for training T-party sleuths how to purge voter rolls. I wrote at the time that,

… they emphasized the need for getting dead and inactive voters off the rolls because of the possibility of widespread voter fraud — or was it a widespread possibility? — for which they never seem to produce evidence. Basically, T-partiers are convinced that if they lose an election it must be because their opponents cheated. What else could it be? Zombies? Bigfoot?!

Much of the day focused on dead and inactive voters who remain on the rolls (by law) too long for the T-party’s liking. So they employ crowd-sourced data-matching to get voters removed. Two women described perusing the MLS listings for homes for sale and foreclosures. Then they drive by, taking geocoded photos of the properties and any empty houses they find to prove to the local Board of Elections that people registered there no longer live there. They scour the daily obituaries for the freshly dead, then take the notices down to the local Board of Elections and try to have them removed from the voter rolls.

Of course, Board of Elections professionals could do all this with enough manpower and enough money from enough taxes … oh, right.

Not once in seven hours, I told my new friend, did anyone suggest expanding the franchise or registering new voters and encouraging them to exercise their right to vote. It was utterly defensive, aimed at keeping the imagined, invisible hoards of THEM  from casting ballots.

Her eyes grew wide in shock as she said, “That’s so sad.”

Gonna soak up the sums
by Tom Sullivan

If nothing else, Sarah Palin’s “bizarro” speech at the Iowa Freedom Summit this weekend warmed up the crowd for the real cowboys.

Sarah Palin is now the rodeo clown sent out to get the crowd riled and make the real cowboys look better in comparison.— Bob Schooley (@Rschooley) January 24, 2015

But even as Republican presidential wannabes tried to out-right each other in Iowa, the people who count most in this country — those with the most to count — held their annual donors’ summit at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Rancho Mirage, CA. John Nichols, writing for The Nation:

“Americans used to think Iowa and New Hampshire held the first caucus and primary in the nation every four years. Not anymore,” explains Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. “Now the ‘Koch brothers primary’ goes first to determine who wins the blessing and financial backing of the billionaire class. This is truly sad and shows us how far Citizens United has gone to undermine American democracy.”

Sanders was referencing the five-year-old US Supreme Court ruling that struck down barriers to corporate spending to buy elections—one of a series of decisions that have dramatically increased the influence of not just of corporations but of billionaires like the Koch brothers.

Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida chose not to attend the Iowa event, instead reserving their time for supplication at the Koch brothers’ event, along with another unofficial 2016 presidential contender, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker:

An hourlong panel discussion featuring U.S. Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Marco Rubio of Florida will take place at 8:30 p.m. Sunday. [PST, presumably]

ABC News chief White House correspondent Jonathan Karl will moderate it, and the network will livestream part of it.

Perhaps Cruz will again repeat the Churchill’s bust nonsense as he did again in Iowa on Saturday. Debunked three years ago? No obstacle in this alternate universe.

Update: More detail on bustgate.

The Dickens, you say?
By Tom Sullivan

As Digby said yesterday, they will never quit trying to dismantle the social safety net. Both here and abroad, it seems, we’ve gotta keep those “takers” from taking. They are somehow keeping our “Makers” from making. (Genuflect here.)

It seems the British have set up a system of sanctions to keep the eligible jobless from receiving help. And, boy howdy, you thought Fox News’ obsession over the grocery shopping habits of Americans receiving SNAP benefits was Dickensian.

Check out the UK Independence Party (UKIP) in the land of Dickens:

“A Ukip parliamentary candidate named Lynton Yates this week suggested banning benefit claimants from driving: “Why do they have the privilege to spend the tax payers [sic] hard earned money on a car, when those in work are struggling to keep their own car on the road?” Ukip’s communications people said that Yates’s suggestions were “not Ukip policies and they will not form part of the Ukip manifesto”, and the media rejoiced in the week’s example of the party’s supposed fruitcakery – though at the time of writing, Mr Yates was still Ukip’s choice for the East Midlands seat of Charnwood.

But the problem isn’t his, or Ukip’s, alone. After all, in the sense that he proposed stripping “benefit claimants” of something most people take for granted, Yates’s plans merely sat on the outer edge of what now passes for mainstream thinking. When the state makes it clear that the poor and unfortunate are not to have spare bedrooms, and embraces the idea of stopping them buying booze and fags and shredding their entitlements if they have more than two kids, is it really such a leap to deny them non-public transport too? For all its inanity, there is a sadism at the heart of the Yates idea that is not a million miles away from the cruelties increasingly built into the benefits system: cruelties most of us would not put up with for a minute, but which are visited on thousands of people every week.

Can’t let them breed, now, can we? Because “nits make lice.”

UKIP issued a statement to clarify that Yates’ pamphlet containing these suggestions was not a joke or a hoax:

On the topic of the cost of keeping criminals in prison, it continued: “I personally would look to overseas countries who could tender for their incarceration.

“I’m sure they could dramatically reduce this cost to the taxpayer.”

And, no doubt, decrease the surplus prison population.

Are we not Ubermen?
by Tom Sullivan

Those using the Gregorian calendar count the years since the birth of Christ as Anno Domini, A.D. Bullshit is probably a lot older. But given that it’s a new millennium, maybe it’s time we started counting the years in A.B. “One of the most salient features of our culture,” as Aaron Hanlon quotes philosopher Harry Frankfurt at Salon, “is that there is so much bullshit.”

Case in point. In its obsession with turning everything on this planet into the Precious (other planets will come later), the Midas cult has turned its sights on sleep because “sleep is the enemy of capital.” Thus, sleep must be abolished. From caffeine-laced Red Bull to topical sprays to marshmallows, “perky jerky,” and military experiments with transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), Newsweek  looks at how we are waging the war on sleep:

For those looking to sleep less without drugs or military tech, there’s the “Uberman” sleep schedule: 20 minute naps taken every four hours. That’s just two hours of sleep in every 24 hours. Uberman is based on the theory that while humans experience two types of sleep, we only need one of those to stay alive. Rapid eye movement (REM) sleep is the stage in which we dream, and it also has been shown in lab tests to be critical to survival: Rodents deprived of REM sleep die after just five weeks. Then there is non-REM sleep, which itself is broken down into four separate stages. One of those is short wave sleep (or SWS). Scientists aren’t really sure what function SWS serves, and Uberman advocates argue that it may not be critical to survival at all.

We spend only 20 percent of our sleeping time in REM sleep, and, usually, we need to work our way up to it, going through non-REM sleep first. But according to the Polyphasic Society, a segmented-sleep advocacy group, that’s a waste. They say the Uberman and sleep schedules like it can force the brain to reconfigure its sleep cycle to avoid the non-REM sleep and jump straight into REM, saving a handful of precious, precious hours every day. The disadvantage? Physical stress, even to the point of lifting heavy objects, can cause Uberman sleepers to unexpectedly “black out.”

That’s nice.

In service to the Midas cult, Americans are working over a month more per year than they did in 1970, Newsweek  reports, “137 hours longer than the Japanese, 260 hours longer than the British and 446 hours longer than the Germans, according to a report put out by the United Nations’ International Labor Organization.” And looking for ways to work even longer hours with even less sleep. Because, Betsy Isaacson writes, “Sleep is perceived to be the enemy of efficiency…”

And why? Because any human inefficiency, anything not critical to (some humans’) survival, anything that stands in the way of converting every human relationship, every human emotion, every waking hour (or unconscious hour, if that can be arranged) into the Precious must be eradicated.

Can you say pathological? Sure, I knew you could.

Born under a bad sign
by Tom Sullivan

On Wednesday, NPR ran a story about a Russian writer, Mikhail Bulgakov, whose work Stalin enjoyed, but whose ideas Stalin considered “too dangerous to publish.” Ideas are like that. Invasive. Pernicious. Bulletproof, as “V” said in the movie. They can spread like a virus. Or, reduced to shibboleths, become objects of worship. For many, freedom works like that now.

Also this week, Michael Kraus and Jacinth J. X. Tan of the University of Illinois released a paper on the role of a particularly virulent notion, essentialism, in how people see themselves and report their health:

In this research, we proposed and examined the possibility that lay theories that people hold about social class categories can mitigate class-related health disparities. Across three studies, we found that while lower-class individuals were more likely to report experiencing poorer health and greater negative self-conscious emotions compared to upper-class individuals when they endorsed essentialist beliefs about social class, this class-based difference was not observed when participants endorsed non-essentialist beliefs about social class.

Basically, if you are poor and believe social status is inbred
—in your genes—you are more likely to report being unhealthy, the study suggests. Poor people without this belief are more likely to report being healthier and less likely to accept their status as unchangeable.

A bad idea like Social Darwinism can be debilitating, studies suggest. Yet, we give lip service to the Horatio Alger myth while privately believing that some people are just “born that way.”

Kraus has been studying this effect for awhile. Last year Kraus released another such study along with Dacher Keltner of the University of California at Berkeley. Matthew Hutson wrote:

Kraus and Keltner looked deeper into the connection between social class and social class essentialism by testing participants’ belief in a just world, asking them to evaluate such statements as “I feel that people get what they are entitled to have.” The psychologist Melvin Lerner developed just world theory in the 1960s, arguing that we’re motivated to believe that the world is a fair place. The alternative—a universe where bad things happen to good people—is too upsetting. So we engage defense mechanisms such as blaming the victim—“She shouldn’t have dressed that way”—or trusting that positive and negative events will be balanced out by karma, a form of magical thinking.

Kraus and Keltner found that the higher people perceived their social class to be, the more strongly they endorsed just-world beliefs, and that this difference explained their increased social class essentialism: Apparently if you feel that you’re doing well, you want to believe success comes to those who deserve it, and therefore those of lower status must not deserve it. (Incidentally, the argument that you “deserve” anything because of your genes is philosophically contentious; none of us did anything to earn our genes.)

The richer you are, the more likely you are to believe it is not the luck of the draw that put you where you are, but something essential about you and your breeding. Poor? You were born under a bad sign.

Social class essentialism is basically inciting social Darwinism. This distortion of Darwin’s theory of evolution, in one interpretation, is the belief that only the fit survive and thrive—and, further, that this process should be accepted or even accelerated by public policy. It’s an example of the logical fallacy known as the “appeal to nature”—what is natural is good. (If that were true, technology and medicine would be moral abominations.) Social class essentialism entails belief in economic survival of the fittest as a fact. It might also entail belief in survival of the fittest as a desired end, given the results linking it to reduced support for restorative interventions. It’s one thing to say, “Those people can’t change, so let’s not waste our time.” It’s another to say, “Those people can’t change, so let’s lock them away.” Or eradicate them: Only four years ago, then-Lt. Gov. of South Carolina Andre Bauer told a town hall meeting that poor people, like “stray animals,” should not be fed, “because they breed.”

More study is required, Kraus and Tan conclude this week. But the work to date suggests that liberating people of this noxious and common essentialist idea might not only improve people’s prospects in life, but their health as well.

“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong,” H.L. Mencken wrote. Explaining high or low status in life as a product of one’s own genetic or moral superiority is one of them. Conversely, one of life’s most profound and hardest-to-accept truths can be found in a two-word bumper sticker: Sh*t happens.

“I won both of them”
by Tom Sullivan

The State of the Union address last night did not disappoint as entertainment (although the president’s pitch for “middle-class economics” didn’t exactly sing to me). President Obama was surprisingly buoyant for a leader whose party got hammered in the fall elections and now occupies less of the House chambers than in a generation. (Transcript here.)

The zinger of the night came when Obama remarked, “I have no more campaigns to run,” and scattered Republicans applauded. The president grinned and shot back, “I know, because I won both of them.”

And maybe that’s Obama’s secret. Freedom’s just another thing…, you know. With his recent in-your-face executive actions, he looks like a leader and the country is responding. His approval ratings hit 50 percent for the first time since the spring of 2013.

Joan Walsh described the speech as “an epic combination of sweet-talking and trash-talking, cajoling and trolling.” Speaker John Boehner, looking darker than ever, sat through the speech, looking sickly. Walsh:

My personal favorite Obama taunt came during his call for a minimum wage hike. “To everyone in this Congress who still refuses to raise the minimum wage, I say this: If you truly believe you could work full-time and support a family on less than $15,000 a year, go try it. If not, vote to give millions of the hardest-working people in America a raise.”

Anyone who tuned in expecting a conciliatory lame duck president was disappointed.

Republicans gave not one, but four responses. Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst, with the official response, Rep. Curt Clawson of Florida for the T-party, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky on YouTube, and Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-FL) with a response in Spanish. Steve Benen provided some explanation at the MaddowBlog:

As we talked about last year at this time, let’s not forget that there used to be one Republican response because the party wouldn’t tolerate any other scenario. GOP lawmakers who deliberately chose to step on – or worse, contradict – their party’s scripted message risked raising the ire of party leaders and insiders. Only one SOTU response was given because no Republican in Congress would dare challenge – or even think to challenge – the party’s message operation.

Those norms have collapsed. “There is no clear leadership in the Republican Party right now, no clear direction or message, and no way to enforce discipline,” Mark McKinnon, a veteran Republican strategist, said last year. “And because there’s a vacuum, and no shortage of cameras, there are plenty of actors happy to audition.”

But it’s risky business, says Joseph P. Williams of U.S. News:

But it’s a risky affair with a small payoff: do things correctly, and you’re likely to get mentioned in a news cycle or two — after endless analysis of the main event; screw up, and you’ll win a starring role on Twitter, cable news and a Saturday Night Live cold-open skit — and not in a good way. Just ask the wooden Bobby Jindal (2009) or Michele “Wrong Camera” Bachmann (2011).

Sen. Joni Ernst may join that lineup this week after her ham-biscuited attempt at being folksy. See #breadbagger.

The bread bags go INSIDE THE SHOES! I GREW UP POOR IN MN. You slip and fall when bags are outside the shoes. #SOTU #BNRNews— Lizz Winstead (@lizzwinstead) January 21, 2015

TP-ing the SOTU

by Tom Sullivan

The T-party will again provide its own response to President Obama’s State of the Union address tonight, Rachel Maddow reports. Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa will give the official Republican response. She may be about the only member of the Senate to the right of Sen. Ted Cruz, Maddow observed. Just not right enough.

The T-party response will come from the same smirking freshman congressman, Rep. Curt Clawson of Florida, who, in a subcommittee hearing last July, mistook two senior American officials from the State Department and from Commerce for Indian nationals. Guess why:

“I’m familiar with your country; I love your country,” the freshman congressman said. “Anything I can do to make the relationship with India better, I’m willing and enthusiastic about doing so.”

“Just as your capital is welcome here to produce good-paying jobs in the U.S., I’d like our capital to be welcome there,” he added. “I ask cooperation and commitment and priority from your government in so doing. Can I have that?”

“I think your question is to the Indian government,” Nisha Biswal said. “We certainly share your sentiment, and we certainly will advocate that on behalf of the U.S.” Working for the State Department, Biswal is a diplomat. Can you tell?

Clawson won his seat in a special election to replace Rep. Trey Radel, who resigned after a conviction for cocaine possession.

If we’re in luck, Clawson will display the same smug, false confidence again. As Maddow said, tonight’s SOTU should be fun.

The courts: Targets of opportunity
by Tom Sullivan

An acquaintance asked Saturday what happens if the Supreme Court rules this summer to lift gay marriage bans across the country. It seems unlikely the Roberts court will overturn rulings in 36 states, he said. He worried that, since so many of the shifts on gay marriage across the country originated in the courts, that the right will not simply use the decision to energize their base in 2016, but to further colonize and control the courts. In fact that has already been occurring, according to Chris Kromm of the Institute for Southern Studies:

Today, special interests are spending record amounts of money on court elections in the 38 states that elect justices to the bench. As a Facing South/Institute for Southern Studies report showed, more than $3 million poured into races for North Carolina’s higher courts in 2014, the first election since state lawmakers — with the help of millionaire donor and political operative Art Pope — eliminated North Carolina’s judicial public financing program.

The controversy over Big Money’s attempted takeover of the courts is now coming to a head. Next week, the U.S. Supreme Court will begin hearing Williams-Yulee vs. The Florida Bar, a case involving a challenge to Florida’s law barring judicial candidates from personally soliciting campaign contributions.

A constellation of groups have filed an amicus brief calling on the Supreme Court to uphold Florida’s ban as a necessary measure to protect the integrity of state courts. As Bert Brandenburg of the court watchdog group Justice at Stake said in a statement unveiling the brief, “Our courts are different from the other two branches of government. If money influences what a legislator or a governor does, it reeks. But if campaign money influences a decision in the courtroom, it violates the Constitution.” 

Having rigged most everything else, Republicans were already mucking about with the courts in North Carolina last summer in a way not seen in any other state:

After passing laws imposing new conditions on abortions and elections, taking away teacher tenure and providing vouchers for private school tuition, Republican state legislators have seen those policies stymied in state and federal courtrooms.

So they have passed another law, this one making those kinds of lawsuits less likely to succeed when filed in state court. Beginning in September [2014], all constitutional challenges to laws will be heard by three-judge trial court panels appointed by the chief justice of the state Supreme Court.

To help ensure passage, GOP lawmakers inserted the provision into four different bills.

Conservative Christian and political leaders seem already to have conceded the legal fight on marriage equality. Per comments at Huffington Post, they plan instead to “shore up the theology around holy matrimony, and fight to defend their religious liberty rights to oppose same-sex marriage.” Still, far be it from the right wing to shun using the animus in its base over hot-button social issue to rally its voters at election time. That’s expected if SCOTUS strikes down remaining gay marriage bans.

But the right also has a knack for blindsiding political opponents legislatively. For example, North Carolina’s 2013 “motorcycle abortion” bill, and the voting restrictions legislation that ballooned overnight from 17 to 57 pages. And since we’ve seen quite a lot of that here in North Carolina, the question about control of the courts prompts one to ask how the GOP might use the SCOTUS ruling to further consolidate power there. Frankly, I don’t know, but it is worth considering now and keeping a watchful eye on later.

Anticipating unfavorable demographic shifts, in 2008 the GOP began investing heavily in the Redistricting Majority Project, or REDMAP, to gain control of state legislatures, and thus, once-a-decade redistricting in 2010:

“The rationale was straightforward,” reads the memo. “Controlling the redistricting process in these states would have the greatest impact on determining how both state legislative and congressional district boundaries would be drawn. Drawing new district lines in states with the most redistricting activity presented the opportunity to solidify conservative policymaking at the state level and maintain a Republican stronghold in the U.S. House of Representatives for the next decade.”

Democrats got caught napping (or at least underfunded). It led to the largest GOP majorities we’ve seen in Congress for decades. Furthermore, GOP-controlled state legislatures implemented a raft of voting changes in states across the country to erect roadblocks to voting that, on balance, would hurt Democrats more than Republican voters: voter identity cards, shortening or eliminating early voting, voting roll purges, etc.

In North Carolina and elsewhere, new Republican policies seem designed to blow holes in municipal budgets, especially in large cities where the big blocks of Democratic voters are. They are cutting state taxes, pushing costs down to the cities, limiting local taxing authority, and privatizing public services to cut into cities’ revenue streams. In short, either driving cities into insolvency or leaving them no choice but to raise taxes and/or cut popular services. It’s the next phase of Defund the Left. And since the tax cuts and privatization are big, wet kisses for corporate sponsors, the strategy is a twofer.

In a few years, Republicans will run on Democrats’ “mismanagement” of city governments in fiscal crisis, counting on voters to have forgotten who engineered the crises. Here, they could either dissolve city governments or, elsewhere, take them over through emergency manager acts, as happened to Detroit. As is still happening in Detroit.

Republicans and their backers are playing the long game and they’re playing to win. They use losses as opportunities to further expand their influence. They’ve been very methodical. They’ve anticipated and planned to win the future much as the left has not.

The comments I heard Saturday about the future of the courts made me wonder what we might need to watch out for next.

Losing our collective nerve
by Tom Sullivan

Besides suffering Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, the decade saw (IIRC) parents bringing the kiddies to the mall on Saturday to be photographed and fingerprinted. Maybe bringing dental impressions to help identify their bodies. We called these “child safe” programs. In the 1950s, it was commies hiding in the woodpile. By the 1980s, it was child abducters hiding behind every tree. Heaven forfend that little Johnny or Janie should walk or ride a bike to school or to the playground without a hypervigilant parent for a bodyguard. Well, somebody is finally trying to beak the spell:

On a recent Saturday afternoon, a 10-year old Maryland boy named Rafi and his 6-year old sister, Dvora, walked home by themselves from a playground about a mile away from their suburban house. They made it about halfway home when the police picked them up. You’ve heard these stories before, about what happens when kids in paranoid, hyperprotective America go to and from playgrounds alone. I bet you can guess the sequence of events preceding and after: Someone saw the kids walking without an adult and called the police. The police tracked down the kids and drove them home. The hitch this time is, when the police got there, they discovered that they were meddling with the wrong family.

Danielle and Alexander Meitiv explicitly ally themselves with the “free range” parenting movement, which believes that children have to take calculated risks in order to learn to be self-reliant. Their kids usually even carry a card that says: “I am not lost. I am a free-range kid,” although they didn’t happen to have it that day. They had carefully prepared their kids for that walk, letting them go first just around the block, then to a library a little farther away, and then the full mile. When the police came to the door, they did not present as hassled overworked parents who leave their children alone at a playground by necessity, or laissez-faire parents who let their children roam wherever, but as an ideological counterpoint to all that’s wrong with child-rearing in America today. If we are lucky, the Meitivs will end up on every morning talk show and help convince American parents that it’s perfectly OK to let children walk without an adult to the neighborhood playground.

There’s video here.

For a culture that once boasted of rugged individualism and John Wayne, we’ve become awfully skittish in the last half century. Nothing like defeating the Axis, staring down the Russians, and landing a man on the moon to build a nation’s confidence. Nothing like Vietnam, Watergate, the Iran hostage crisis, and the Beirut Marine barracks bombing to shake it. By the mid-1980s, Americans were in full moral panic mode over Satanic ritual abuse and alien abductions. After September 11, we’d become a nation of bedwetters convinced that bearded men with long, curved knives are coming to kill us all in our beds. We’re packing heat and opening fire on anything that goes bump in the night either at home or abroad.

Lenore Skenazy found herself declared “America’s worst mom” by multiple news outlets after writing about letting her 9-year-old ride the New York subway alone. America is having a “hysterical moment,” she writes:

That weekend I started my Free-Range Kids blog to explain my philosophy. Obviously, I love safety: My kid wears a helmet, got strapped into a car seats, always wears his seat belt. But I don’t believe kids need a security detail every time they leave the house. When society thinks they do — and turns that fear into law — loving, rational parents get arrested.

Just checking Mapquest, my parents would have been arrested in two states on either side of the Mason-Dixon line. As a child living in a major city in the early 1960s, I and my classmates walked to a grade school about half a mile away in sun, rain, and snow. (Few families had more than one car anyway.) In a smaller, southern city, I occasionally rode a bike to school 3.5 miles away. The horror.

We as a country would be lot less dangerous to ourselves and to the world if we actually accepted the risks we used to before losing our collective nerve.