RON BAILEY: Was the Biotech Wheat Found in Oregon Surreptitiously Sowed by Anti-GMO Activists?

ROGER SIMON: Martin Bashir’s Nostalgic Liberal Racism. “What interests me is why people like Bashir maintain this need to brand anyone even vaguely to the right as racist. It’s almost a disorder worthy of classification in the DSM-5 — PRDS: Projective Racist Derangement Syndrome.”

STRAIGHT OUT OF ORWELL: “The digital superstate is useless when it matters.”

Well, unless what matters is spying on political opponents. Then, presumably, it works fairly well.

MICHAEL WALSH ON NSA AND THE SCANDALANCHE:

As former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy has pointed out, the courts have held that, while the contents of phone conversation are private, the records — who called whom, when, from where and for how long — of such calls are not.

What makes the news scary are the revelations of what else Team Obama’s been up to. Follow the bouncing scandal ball:

* On Benghazi, the administration has simply clammed up, keeping suspicions alive that there’s much more to this story. A handful of intrepid reporters have bucked the tide, but others have stopped asking why no help was sent and where President Obama was that night. Because . . .

* In clear violation of the First Amendment, the administration — allegedly angered about national-security leaks — seized phone records from the AP and Fox News in a what looks like a transparent attempt to put the fear of God into them and keep others incuriously toeing the party line, which mostly amount to: Trust us. But can we? Consider . . .

* The strange goings-on at the Environmental Protection Agency, where recently-departed chief Lisa Jackson was using a fictitious e-mail account in order to communicate privately without all those pesky “transparency” requirements. How widespread is this practice? What to make of word that Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius was also using “secondary” e-mail accounts?

* Then came the IRS bombshell — something every taxpaying American can relate to. That a supposedly neutral collection agency with powers far beyond what we entrust to law enforcement would cheerfully target Tea Party and other righty groups for special scrutiny is the stuff of Orwellian nightmares. And although the IRS has tried to blame “rogue elements” in its Cincinnati office, whistleblowers are coming out of the woodwork to point the finger directly at the White House.

All this adds up to a perfect storm of mistrust, now exacerbated by the fears of the surveillance state that has mushroomed since the panicky post-9/11 “reforms.” Thus Americans now fear a culture of suspicion among top law-enforcement officials, who treat more than 300 million overwhelmingly law-abiding Americans as potential criminals, subject to snoops and pat-downs.

And when that leviathan falls down on the job — as it did in failing to spot the Tsarnaev brothers — then the trade-off between liberty and security becomes a very bad bargain indeed.

Yes.

SAY, DID I MENTION THAT THE INSTA-WIFE HAS A NEW BOOK OUT? It’s doing pretty well considering the official publication date isn’t until next week.

And check out this nice review from John Tierney.

IT’S SCAMS ALL THE WAY DOWN: ABC News: Democratic Convention Organizers Inflate Prices of Lost Electronics, Claim $500K.

Organizers of the Charlotte, N.C., convention have filed an eyebrow-raising police report for lost and stolen electronics, some of which they have valued at as much as 62 times the listed market prices.

A reportedly stolen 13-inch MacBook Pro laptop? $75,537. The price listed on the Apple website is $1,199. A lost iPhone? $30,503. A lost Blackberry? $54,250.

Other items reported to have gone missing at the convention included two iPads worth around $15,000 each, laptops listed at $40,000, $34,000 and $25,000 each, and other miscellaneous items worth far more than their list price.

The report claims that 40 items were reported lost and one item – the most highly valued one, the $75,000 MacBook Pro – was stolen.

The inflated prices were reported in May with the Charlotte Police Department by Kenneth Hardy, deputy in-house counsel for the Democratic National Convention Committee, on behalf of the DNCC Host Committee.

The report was filed almost eight months after the convention, when the losses supposedly took place.

Now, see, a Republican could go to jail for that kind of fraud.

WELL, WHAT ISN’T? Menopause Is All The Fault of Men.

NSA’S PRISM PROGRAM just the tip of the iceberg?

ERDOGAN UPDATE: Violent Clashes In Turkey As Police Enter Park At The Heart Of Protests.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: “Exploding Offers” Come To Law School Financial Aid.

JAMES TARANTO: Pathological Altruism: A simple concept that could revolutionize scientific and social thought. Taranto is commenting on Barbara Oakley’s work, and observes:

Pathological altruism is at the root of the liberal left’s crisis of authority, which we discussed in our May 20 column. The left derives its sense of moral authority from the supposition that its intentions are altruistic and its opponents’ are selfish. That sense of moral superiority makes it easy to justify immoral behavior, like slandering critics of President Obama as racist–or using the power of the Internal Revenue Service to suppress them. It seems entirely plausible that the Internal Revenue Service officials who targeted and harassed conservative groups thought they were doing their patriotic duty. If so, what a perfect example of pathological altruism.

Oakley concludes by noting that “during the twentieth century, tens of millions [of] individuals were killed under despotic regimes that rose to power through appeals to altruism.” An understanding that altruism can produce great evil as well as good is crucial to the defense of human freedom and dignity.

Altruism can be a tool for manipulators, just like any other human trait. Here’s video of Oakley talking about this.

PUSHING BACK AGAINST INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY OVERREACH. A song written in 1893 is still under copyright. Or is it?

Now, the documentary film company says it has “irrefutable documentary evidence, some dating back to 1893, [which] shows that the copyright to ‘Happy Birthday,’ if there ever was a valid copyright to any part of the song, expired no later than 1921 and that if defendant Warner/Chappell owns any rights to ‘Happy Birthday,’ those rights are limited to the extremely narrow right to reproduce and distribute specific piano arrangements for the song published in 1935.”

Regardless, copyrights last too long. Here’s a short piece I wrote recently for Popular Mechanics, and a much longer one (though still not all that long by law review standards) that Rob Merges and I wrote for the Harvard Journal on Legislation.

READER BOOK PLUG: Charlie Stross sent me an advance Kindle copy of his Neptune’s Brood, which comes out in a couple of weeks and is a sort-of-sequel to Saturn’s Children, which I liked a lot. I just started reading it last night, but so far it’s quite good.

21ST CENTURY CULTURE: Important: Researcher Says that Berenstain Bears, Franklin the Friendly Turtle Perpetuate “Racist,” “Socially Dominant Norms” to Children.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Nine Percent Of Americans Say They’d Bonk A Sexbot. The number would increase if the sexbots got better, I suspect.

Of course, if vibrators count as robots, the numbers are already much, much higher. Some related thoughts here.

SHOCK: No! Sharyl Attkisson’s computer breached? Get OUT!

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandals, Day 37.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Obamacare Round-up: ACA Support in a Death Spiral.

With each passing year, people are becoming warier and warier of Obamacare. WSJ has the results of a new survey on attitudes toward the ACA conducted by Mercer. It found that only 9 percent of companies now believe Obamacare won’t raise their health care costs significantly, compared to 20 percent last year and 25 percent in 2011.

Maybe, just maybe the decline in support has something to do with the information we’ve gotten in recent weeks about the likely costs of insurance under the ACA. It’s becoming clearer every day that the rates on the California exchanges are going to be too high for many Americans, President Obama’s celebratory remarks on California’s lower-than-expected premiums notwithstanding. Even ACA supporters are now saying that the rates are too high. . . .

Declining support for and increased anxiety about the ACA is bad news for the President because it’s self-fulling in a way: the more the public distrusts Obamacare, the less likely it is that people will sign up for insurance—and the more likely in turn that the law will fail. But there’s perhaps an even more immediate problem for the law hitting the news today. Many insurers aren’t signing up to offer plans in the small business exchanges.

It’s almost like it was designed to fail or something.