The Return Of The Mutual Aid Society

The title is probably misleading, as the Odd Fellows and Knights of Columbus are still around, but Reason has a fascinating story in the "reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated" vein: mutual aid societies (in the guise of "sharing ministries") have made a comeback in the wake of Obamacare.

I predicted that Obamacare would lead to the demise of Samaritan and two similar organizations in the U.S. This model, I thought, wouldn’t be able to compete with the heavily subsidized plans soon to become available on the new health-care exchanges.

Wow, did I get that wrong. As The New York Times reported recently,

[M]embership in sharing ministries has more than doubled over the last six years, to 535,000 from about 200,000…The growth seems to have come largely through word of mouth, at churches, schools and workplaces.

There's also this:

The opportunity to help their fellow Christians is something these men and women deeply value. "Instead of wanting to be part of an insurance company, I wanted to be part of something where the body of Christ was banding together and doing what the bible commanded in a more personal and real way," Samaritan's Executive Vice President James Lansberry told me in an interview.

 Yes, this. One of the basic problems I see with the state-centered approach to charity is how much it divorces the giver from the recipient. I'm not sure how real that connection can be in an organization that now numbers 200,000 members, but it certainly seems more likely than a huge bureaucracy numbering millions.

Finding The Right Enemy, Part Deaux

Shot. Chaser.

Obamacare Enrollment Is Not The Same Thing As Paid For

Something I came across thanks to a tweet by Rich Weinstein yesterday: it turns out that, while Obamacare enrollment is only a smidge off-target, comparatively, the number of people who have actually paid for coverage is a vastly different thing:

"Facts are stubborn things..."
Jordan Candler: Is the ObamaCare Death Spiral Underway? — The Patriot Post https://t.co/ywv8wQL1tl

— Rich Weinstein (@phillyrich1) March 16, 2016

As The Hill notes, only 8.8 million people have actually paid for their services, "a drop of almost 25 percent compared to the 11.7 million people who were signed up at the beginning of 2015." As the Kaiser Family Foundation report in the story at the tweet above notes,

Affordability remains a challenge. A recent Kaiser poll found that the overwhelming reason why people who are uninsured say they are uncovered is cost – 46% of uninsured, non-elderly adults say they tried to get coverage but found that it was too expensive. However, it is difficult to separate lack of affordability from lack of awareness of financial help that may be available, which could be addressed through more intensive outreach. For example, going into this last open enrollment period, another poll found that 82% of uninsured adults had not been contacted in the previous 6 months about the health law.

Ya think? It was always a bad idea to rely on young adults as the fiscal backbone of Obamacare. Such have poor-paying jobs, and careers delayed by minimum wage hikes keeping young people out of the labor market at near record levels — and thus delaying their advancement to other, better-paying jobs.

The Cultural Parasite

So the new Ghostbusters trailer came out a few days ago. The distaff casting of the leads has turned into a culture war flashpoint, with its obvious, tedious "girl power" message front and center. Predictably, Salon has slings and arrows for the doubters (an earlier version of the headline apparently called them "angry baby men"). I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that the film itself when released may have funny moments in it, but is not funny in its entirety. This is hard to do when one's form is dictated by Maoist denunciation. That this is not likely to produce good results should come as no surprise, and we can pretty readily predict the form of the destructor when it comes to any ensuing criticism:

Amazing. 😂 by @plebcomics pic.twitter.com/8oUzm6Dpe6

— RIP America (@LibertarianHoe) March 7, 2016

It seems to me there's a common thread here between this reboot and Anita Sarkeesian, and it is the demand to insinuate oneself in and hijack a successful franchise and inject dogma into it for entirely political reasons. The business of making a film or a TV show or a video game are all acts that require financing and courage, two items culture critics such as Sarkeesian notably lack. Such are also, notably, philistines, which is to say they oppose the very process of making art. But there is no guarantee the public will lap up the output of such efforts. I have a rule that if a comedy can't generate enough good material to make me laugh in a trailer, it's not worth seeing, and this appears to be no exception. The problem with the Ghostbusters reboot is precisely that it has been sold as feminist agitprop, and now that the filmgoing public has figured this out (thanks to an uninspiring trailer featuring bored actors and limp deliveries), the search for villains has begun.

Apple Signals Its Craven Capitulation To FBI Backdoor Demands

Among civil libertarians, Apple has — hitherto — garnered many plaudits for its very public defiance of an FBI-obtained court order to create a new backdoor in iPhones, one that would allow anyone in possession of same to easily unlock the device. Apple's open letter to its customers makes very clear what is at stake:

Specifically, the FBI wants us to make a new version of the iPhone operating system, circumventing several important security features, and install it on an iPhone recovered during the investigation. In the wrong hands, this software — which does not exist today — would have the potential to unlock any iPhone in someone’s physical possession.

The FBI may use different words to describe this tool, but make no mistake: Building a version of iOS that bypasses security in this way would undeniably create a backdoor. And while the government may argue that its use would be limited to this case, there is no way to guarantee such control.

The DOJ has invoked the All Writs Act, a very old, general-purpose law (emboldening mine):

It is essential to this story that the order to Apple is not a subpoena: it is issued under the All Writs Act of 1789, which says that federal courts can issue “all writs necessary or appropriate in aid of their respective jurisdictions and agreeable to the usages and principles of law.” Read as a whole, this simply means that judges can tell people to follow the law, but they have to do so in a way that, in itself, respects the law. The Act was written at a time when a lot of the mechanics of the law still had to be worked out. But there are qualifications there: warnings about the writs having to be “appropriate” and “agreeable,” not just to the law but to the law’s “principles.” The government, in its use of the writ now, seems to be treating those caveats as background noise.  If it can tell Apple, which has been accused of no wrongdoing, to sit down and write a custom operating system for it, what else could it do?

 In fact, this legal strategy appears to have been decided upon when the political winds for legislation turn sour last year:

In a secret meeting convened by the White House around Thanksgiving, senior national security officials ordered agencies across the U.S. government to find ways to counter encryption software and gain access to the most heavily protected user data on the most secure consumer devices, including Apple Inc.’s iPhone, the marquee product of one of America’s most valuable companies, according to two people familiar with the decision.

The approach was formalized in a confidential National Security Council “decision memo,” tasking government agencies with developing encryption workarounds, estimating additional budgets and identifying laws that may need to be changed to counter what FBI Director James Comey calls the “going dark” problem: investigators being unable to access the contents of encrypted data stored on mobile devices or traveling across the Internet. Details of the memo reveal that, in private, the government was honing a sharper edge to its relationship with Silicon Valley alongside more public signs of rapprochement.

You might think that this would apply only to terrorism cases, but as Jim Comey made plain, the FBI intends to use such backdoors in even such common instances as car wrecks. So it was with great sadness I read a story today in Gizmodo that Tim Cook now is calling for the creation of a government commission to arbitrate the request. The reading I have of this is

1. He does not think Apple can win the court case.
2. He is perfectly aware of who would populate such a commission, i.e. surveillance state apologists who would immediately roll over for the government.

Which is to say, charges that Apple is making a show of opposing this order for purely commercial reasons appear now to have more weight than they did Friday. Jim Comey's cynical Lawfare blog post on the subject could be right, for the wrong reasons, but then, he's the one putting Apple's neck in a noose.

Footnote: Why did Gizmodo understand what's at stake here on Wednesday...

If Apple makes this software, it will allow the FBI to bypass security measures, including an auto-delete function that erases the key needed to decrypt data once a passcode is entered incorrectly after ten tries as well as a timed delay after each wrong password guess. Since the FBI wants to use the brute force cracking method—basically, trying every possible password—both of those protections need to go to crack Farook’s passcode. (Of course, if he used a shitty password like 1234, the delay wouldn’t be as big a problem, since the FBI could quickly guess.)

The security measures that the FBI wants to get around are crucial privacy features on iOS9, because they safeguard your phone against criminals and spies using the brute force attack. So it’s not surprising that Apple is opposing the court order. There is more than one person’s privacy at stake here!

... yet utterly forget it today?

The feds disagree. In a Sunday night editorial on Lawfare, a national security blog supported by the Brookings Institute, FBI director James Comey claims that the case “isn’t about trying to set a precedent or send any kind of message.” Comey begs:

We simply want the chance, with a search warrant, to try to guess the terrorist’s passcode without the phone essentially self-destructing and without it taking a decade to guess correctly. That’s it. We don’t want to break anyone’s encryption or set a master key loose on the land.

So it’s a classic he-said-he-said situation. ...

No, it's not. Gizmodo got blinded by Comey's authoritarian lunacy. 

STEM And Competence Vs. Credentialism

Scott Alexander wrote and then disappeared a great, long, rambling rant about various matters, in part related to credentials vs. competence. This sparked a spirited conversation in the comments, which is all we have of it now. (I suspect he plans eventually on trimming it down to fighting weight, and republishing it then.) I wanted to focus here on this snippet (quoted parts are from Alexander's original):

The Blue Tribe protects its own and wants to impoverish anyone who doesn’t kowtow to their institutions. For the same reason, we get bizarre occupational licensing restrictions like needing two years of training to braid people’s hair, which have been proven time and time again not to work or improve quality.

The opposite of credentialism is meritocracy—the belief that the best person should get the job whether or not they’ve given $200,000 to Yale. In my crazy conspiracy theory, social justice is the attack arm of the educated/urban/sophisticated/academic Blue Tribe, which works by constantly insisting all competing tribes are racist and sexist and therefore need to be dismantled/taken over/put under Blue Tribe supervision for their own good. So we get told that meritocracy is racist and sexist. Colleges have pronounced talking about meritocracy to be a microaggression, and the media has declared that supporting meritocracy is inherently racist. Likewise, we are all told that standardized tests and especially IQ are racist and hurt minorities, even though in reality this testing helps advance minorities better than the current system.

As we saw when Asians rose up to block Democratic efforts to reinstate affirmative action at the University of California,  the winners and losers in such efforts are not always readily discernible. But when that same UC pronounces meritocracy as microaggression, you know which direction the system's overlords intend to take the discussion: toward more credentials, and less actual aptitude. Popehat collective blogger @ClarkHat* suggested why progressives have a love/hate relationship with STEM disciplines:

This is why progs hate / love STEM: it's a juicy target that hasn't yet fallen to credentialism that privileges them https://t.co/nwyYtlKn20

— Grim Dark Future Hat (@ClarkHat) February 19, 2016

I seem to recall Alexander mentioning a "Silicon Valley 2.0" as a place taken over by credentialists, which would be a field day for people like the censorious Anita Sarkeesian (who lately seems to have snuck into Twitter's censorship board) and naked lunatics like Shanley Kane, whose editorial stance is that competence is the new sexism. I would hope it goes without saying that these people must be resisted with every tool at our disposal.

---

* I've since been informed that ClarkHat no longer writes for Popehat.

The ACLU Comes Out Against Another Civil Right, Mens Rea

It's been a long while since I wrote any checks to the ACLU, and even then, I only gave to the nonprofit ACLU Foundation, which is the arm that files lawsuits. It might surprise some to learn that the ACLU proper is a 501(c)4 and engages in much politicking I despise, which informs their at first strange but entirely comprehensible rejection of the return of mens rea to criminal law. As explained in Gideon Yaffe's New York Times editorial,

As a legal principle, mens rea means that causing harm should not be enough to constitute a crime; knowingly causing harm should be. Walking away from the baggage carousel with a suitcase you mistook for your own isn’t theft; it’s theft only if you knew you didn’t own it. Ordinary citizens may assume that this common-sense requirement is already the law of the land. And indeed law students are taught that prosecutors must prove not just that a defendant did something bad, but also that his frame of mind made him culpable when he did it.

But over the years, exceptions to the principle have become common because mens rea requirements have not been consistently detailed in laws. In one often-cited case, the president of a company that mistakenly shipped mislabeled drugs was convicted of a crime even though he had no way of knowing that the labels were incorrect. In another, a truck driver crossing the Canadian border into Washington to deliver cases of beer was convicted of drug trafficking even though prosecutors produced no evidence that he knew or should have known that the truck had a secret compartment filled with drugs. In these cases and many more like them, the prosecution secured conviction without showing that the defendant had a guilty mind.

ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero objected that

These plans, if implemented, would require prosecutors to prove that a defendant was aware of the illegal nature of his or her actions and intended to cause them. Proving such intent would be nearly impossible for many financial, environmental and regulatory crimes but relatively simple for drug and property crimes

In other words, because such a law could defend rich white guys, because we want to convict people we know are guilty despite their own knowledge of the facts on the ground (and mental state, therefore), we would rather throw out the whole legislation. It's hard to express just how corrupt and political the ACLU has become, but there it is.