More from Mark Steyn.

It’s also a low-risk one. Once upon a time we killed and captured pirates. Today, it’s all more complicated. The attorney general, Eric Holder, has declined to say whether the kidnappers of the American captain will be “brought to justice” by the U.S. “I’m not sure exactly what would happen next,” declares the chief law-enforcement official of the world’s superpower. But some things we can say for certain. Obviously, if the United States Navy hanged some eyepatched peglegged blackguard from the yardarm or made him walk the plank, pious senators would rise to denounce an America that no longer lived up to its highest ideals, and the network talking-heads would argue that Plankgate was recruiting more and more young men to the pirates’ cause, and judges would rule that pirates were entitled to the protections of the U.S. constitution and that their peglegs had to be replaced by high-tech prosthetic limbs at taxpayer expense.

Meanwhile, the Royal Navy, which over the centuries did more than anyone to rid the civilized world of the menace of piracy, now declines even to risk capturing their Somali successors, having been advised by Her Majesty’s Government that, under the European Human Rights Act, any pirate taken into custody would be entitled to claim refugee status in the United Kingdom and live on welfare for the rest of his life. I doubt Pirates of the Caribbean would have cleaned up at the box office if the big finale had shown Geoffrey Rush and his crew of scurvy sea dogs settling down in council flats in Manchester and going down to the pub for a couple of jiggers of rum washed down to cries of “Aaaaargh, shiver me benefits check, lad.” From “Avast, me hearties!” to a vast welfare scam is not progress.

Some people don’t deserve to have rights. Constraining state action against these people can be problematic.

Mark Steyn notes:

If the incompetent management driving the New York Times from junk status to oblivion wished to decelerate their terminal decline, they might usefully amend their motto to “All the News That’s Fit to Distract.” Tom Blumer of Newsbusters notes that in the last 30 days there have been some 2,500 stories featuring Obama and “distractions,” as opposed to about 800 “distractions” for Bush in his entire second term. The sub-headline of the Reuters story suggests the unprecedented pace at which the mountain of distractions is piling up: “First North Korea, Iran — now Somali pirates.”

The bias is not explicit. Its more implicit. Its more about word choice and narrative selection.

All of sudden wiretapping seems much more reasonable.

Friday evening, in a motion to dismiss Jewel v. NSA, EFF’s litigation against the National Security Agency for the warrantless wiretapping of countless Americans, the Obama Administration’s made two deeply troubling arguments.

First, they argued, exactly as the Bush Administration did on countless occasions, that the state secrets privilege requires the court to dismiss the issue out of hand. They argue that simply allowing the case to continue “would cause exceptionally grave harm to national security.” As in the past, this is a blatant ploy to dismiss the litigation without allowing the courts to consider the evidence.

It’s an especially disappointing argument to hear from the Obama Administration. As a candidate, Senator Obama lamented that the Bush Administration “invoked a legal tool known as the ’state secrets’ privilege more than any other previous administration to get cases thrown out of civil court.” He was right then, and we’re dismayed that he and his team seem to have forgotten.

Sad as that is, it’s the Department Of Justice’s second argument that is the most pernicious. The DOJ claims that the U.S. Government is completely immune from litigation for illegal spying — that the Government can never be sued for surveillance that violates federal privacy statutes.

This is a radical assertion that is utterly unprecedented. No one — not the White House, not the Justice Department, not any member of Congress, and not the Bush Administration — has ever interpreted the law this way.

Several of my readers were very critical of the Bush administration’s wiretapping policy. I look forward to hearing the same criticism of the Obama administration in the comments section of this post.

Over at The Other McCain, Robert writes:

One also hears the grumbling that, because various Republicans have voted for bailouts or “stimulus” bills, it is hypocritical partisan demagoguery for conservatives to speak out against this economic agenda. OK, fine. Show me where Michelle Malkin, Glenn Reynolds, the Cato Institute or Americans for Limited Government — I’m kind of pulling names out of the hat here — have ever endorsed any of this stuff, even when George Bush and John McCain were enthusiastically pushing for it.

(Crickets chirping.) The Tea Party movement is not about Glenn Beck, Rick Moran, George Bush or John McCain. It’s not about re-electing any Republican in Washington, or electing any current or future Republican candidate for office. It’s about advocating a very simple idea of economic liberty as a fundamental principle of a free society.

If you don’t get that, fine. Stay home April 15 and grumble all you want about populist demagoguery, but I know where the friends of freedom will be.

As a friend of freedom you can count me in.

To some of my readers who seem to confuse charity with coercion more often then I would like:

In the comments on my health care rationing post, I received many standard attacks as being cold-hearted and willing to deny health care to people who need it.

From a libertarian perspective, your generosity is reflected in what you do with your own money, not in what you do with other people’s money. If I give a lot of money to charity, then I am generous. If you give a smaller fraction of your money to charity, then you are less generous. But if you want to tax me in order to give my money to charity, that does not make you generous.

Your vote supported the bulk of this debt.

Does a nice job of showing the variably in how justice is applied to breaking the law by not paying your taxes.

John Carney reports:

The government’s official view that toxic assets are incorrectly priced due to illiquidity “fire sales” is wrong, a new study by Harvard and Princeton finance professors suggests.

You can read the whole paper by Harvard’s Joshua Coval and Erik Stafford and Princeton’s Jakub Jurek below. The striking conclusion is that the low prices of toxic assets actually reflect the fundamentals, rather than being driven by an illiquidity discount.

I suspect this will be the rhetorical argument employed to challenge Obama in the 2012 presidential election. I also think this argument has a great deal of traction.

From my naive view it seemed to me that the state intervention of the financial sector was more about investors not wanting to have to pay for toxic assets than because those assets were ‘priced wrong’. If the financial market is more or less free, than the pricing of any assets is what the market thinks it’s worth. To argue that the market value is wrong is simply to argue that you don’t like the price the markets has given your asset. When you don’t like the price the market gives your asset then the only way to remedy it is to use coercion to change the price. That’s exactly what the state did, it used it’s force to change the price of these assets.

The only problem of course is that the new prices are actually wrong. Meaning the price no longer matches the value the markets places on these assets. Eventually the actual market prices will be persist, but it’s probably going to require a different economic policy most likely from a fiscal conservative administration.

Consider if I was in the market for purchasing a house, then its quite conceivable that some of my tax money would be used to inflate the price of some of the houses I’m looking at. Effectively I’ve been taxed to pay more for a house then its worth. I’m not sure how true this is, but if there is some truth to it, oh the irony.

John Tierney makes an interesting observation about the state doing experiments:

But if you are the mayor of New York, no such constraints apply. You can simply announce, as Michael Bloomberg did, that the city is starting a “nationwide initiative” to pressure the food industry and restaurant chains to cut salt intake by half over the next decade. Why bother with consent forms when you can automatically enroll everyone in the experiment?

And why bother with a control group when you already know the experiment’s outcome? The city’s health commissioner, Thomas R. Frieden, has enumerated the results. If the food industry follows the city’s wishes, the health department’s Web site announces, “that action will lower health care costs and prevent 150,000 premature deaths every year.”

But that prediction is based on an estimate based on extrapolations based on assumptions that have yet to be demonstrated despite a half-century of efforts. No one knows how people would react to less-salty food, much less what would happen to their health.

Whats crucial here is how the experts is used to justify coercion. This is why I’m very weary of experts employed in a political capacity. Evidence is not that compelling when it’s backed by state coercion.

Also note the rhetorical argument employed by Bloomberg that forcing these policies will save money in the form of reduced health care cost. Seeing that kind of argumentation being employed by a politician should cue every single citizen to the dangers of health care paid for by the state. Once the state has a financial stake in the citizenry’s health, also sorts of justification for making the citizenry do things they don’t want to do will be employed. Arguably, this worst part of universal health care is that it gives politicians much more control over my personal choices.

Since 1998, the global air temperature has been decreasing. Now, science is being used to show how global cooling really means global warming.

The paper shows, both in recent records and projections using computer simulations, how utterly normal it is to have decade-long vagaries in temperature, up and down, on the way to a warmer world. The paper is titled simply, “Is the climate warming or cooling?” It is written by David R. Easterling of the National Climatic Data Center and Michael F. Wehner of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The bottom line? “We show that the climate over the 21st century can and likely will produce periods of a decade or two where the globally averaged surface air temperature shows no trend or even slight cooling in the presence of longer-term warming,” the paper says, adding that, “It is easy to ‘cherry pick’ a period to reinforce a point of view.”

Indeed, it IS easy to ‘cherry pick’ data to reinforce a point of view. I wonder if these guys realize how ironic they are?