NEWS YOU CAN USE: Why you can’t use “beer goggles” as an excuse for your drunken hookups.

THIS MAY HURT THEIR “GOOD GUY” IMAGE: Silicon Valley Doesn’t Just Help the Surveillance State—It Built It. “The government’s massive data collection and surveillance system was largely built not by professional spies or Washington bureaucrats but by Silicon Valley and private defense contractors.”

ED FELTEN ON NSA SNOOPING: 51% foreign test doesn’t protect Americans. “As an example, consider Facebook, which appears to have about 1 billion users worldwide, of which roughly 160 million are in the U.S and the other 840 million are foreign. If you collect data about every single Facebook user, then you are getting 84% non-U.S. records. So even a ‘collect all data’ procedure meets the 51% foreign test—despite doing nothing to shield Americans from collection.”

SPACE LAW UPDATE: Dozens of firms want to commercialise space in various ways. Bureaucracy, not just gravity, is holding them back.

SCIENCE: New study links college major to sleep schedule. “A student’s morningness-eveningness influence on their selection of a college major likely involves both personality traits and their built-in biological tolerance for early (morning-oriented) versus late or irregular (evening-oriented) job hours.”

READER BOOK PLUG: From Taylor Dinerman, Subway Lists and Other Writings from the iPhone Era: Including “The Pepsi Haggadah.”

LESSONS FROM EDUCATION in China and India?

JIM GERAGHTY: “Hey, remember way back when wiretapping the Democratic Party’s headquarters was a huge scandal?”

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIP ADVICE: How Do You Maintain Desire in a Long-Term Relationship? Group Sex. “Sometimes I feel that I am enjoying the best of both the sacred and secular worlds. Beyond my circle of friends, I have no idea how common this practice is among clergy.”

I’m noticing a theme in this Slate series. Costumes, threesomes, group sex, etc. Those are crutches for the lazy.

AN IRS SCANDAL UPDATE: Debunking “Myths” Spread By IRS Defenders.

IRS SCANDAL UPDATE: IRS Official Who Oversaw Tea Party Targeting Is A Registered Democrat.

THUG-SOCIALISM ALWAYS WORKS OUT THE SAME WAY EVENTUALLY: The Ghost of Chavez: Venezuela Getting Sicker.

Despite some of the largest oil reserves on the planet and freedom from a US embargo like the one that beset Cuba, it turns out that Venezuela is an equally sad example of what a socialist paradise looks like. Food, medicine, toilet paper, and dollars are either impossible to find or priced out of anyone’s ability to afford them. Growth in this year’s first quarter clocked in at less than a percentage point, with GDP expected to contract by one percent at year’s end. Year after year, a vicious cycle spawned by a labyrinth of price and currency controls cuts off the oxygen supply to Venezuela’s import-dependent economy and ends up making goods more scarce and inflation more severe.

The only people who get richer are the apparatchiks and their cronies. But electorates fall for it on a regular basis, because — thanks to the human faults of envy and greed — although it’s a failure as policy, it’s a successful con.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Obama Is Just Being Obama. “Obama is perturbed that we question any of this malfeasance. I think he is right to be angry. In his case, we made up the Obama rules that symbolism (not performance) and amnesty (not accountability) count. So why break our covenant with him, and now start asking for concrete and honest accomplishment when the teleprompter was always enough?”

A CONTRARIAN TAKE: “If the NSA leak is a bid by Obama to gain sympathy, it’s working.”

LIZ SIDOTI: Obama Presidency At Risk of Imploding Because of Lack of Trust. “If he can’t convince the American people that they can trust him, he could end up damaging the legacy he has worked so hard to control and shape — and be remembered, even by those who once supported him, as the very opposite of the different type of leader he promised to be.”

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Hundreds in government had advance word of Medicare action at heart of trading-spike probe.

HOPEY-CHANGEY: Gen. Hayden: Under Obama, the NSA has more power.

SCOTUSBLOG WILL BE liveblogging Supreme Court opinions and orders.

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NOLAN FINLEY: Let’s Get Rid Of The IRS.

THE HILL: Roundup: NSA surveillance programs: Latest news.

NOW INTO THE SECOND MONTH: TaxProf Roundup: The IRS Scandal, Day 32.

THOUGH IF OBAMA WAS SNOOPING ON CONGRESS, YOU’D THINK HE’D HAVE DONE BETTER AT MOVING HIS LEGISLATION. Snooping Concerns Emerge Over Congressional Blackberries Serviced By Verizon. “Through a blanket seizing of these communications, the NSA is permanently intercepting and storing privileged material. This rasies further constitutional issues regarding separation of powers.”

WELCOME TO THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: Tim Lee: Has the US become the type of nation from which you have to seek asylum?

The civilian whistleblowers targeted by the Obama administration haven’t received treatment as harsh as Manning’s. But it’s telling that in none of their cases have the courts reached the legal and constitutional merits. The government’s strategy, in leak cases and many others, is to seek the maximum possible charges and then “plea bargain” down to a sentence the government considers more reasonable. . . .

If Snowden had chosen to stay in the United States, he would have faced a stark choice: accept a multi-year prison sentence for actions he believed to be in the public interest or go to trial and risk decades in prison if the courts were not persuaded by his legal and constitutional arguments. The American activist Aaron Swartz was facing exactly that choice when he committed suicide in January.

Someone should write an article about this phenomenon.