Scientists sometimes introduce a predator into an ecosystem in order to take care of a pest that is threatening say, the potato crop. These experiments often go wrong - the predator turns out to be more dangerous than the pest. Social engineers do the same thing as scientists, except with human beings. One example is China’s one child policy to control overpopulation. The jury is still out on whether or not that policy will benefit the world or China in the long term. It certainly doesn’t benefit human freedom.

In the United States, our greatest social engineering experiment is something most people called The War on Drugs. The War on Drugs is actually a war on freedom, when thought about literally. It is also an experiment in introducing a predator to take care of a pest. What do you do when the predator you introduced to take care of the pest turns out to be much worse than the pest?

WASHINGTON (Map, News) - The violent assault on Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo’s home late last month was certainly not the first bungled raid by a government SWAT team, but the bad publicity it generated should make it the last time these trigger-happy squads target innocent civilians. Tracking a 32-pound package of marijuana that had been addressed to Calvo’s wife, Trinity Tomsic, Prince George’s sheriff’s deputies forcibly entered the mayor’s home on July 29 and killed his two dogs before handcuffing him and his mother-in-law.

But like so many other SWAT team raids across the country, this one turned out to be a big mistake. After reviewing the case, State’s Attorney Glenn Ivey acknowledged that the Calvos were victims of a multistate drug ring that used innocent people’s names and addresses to hide shipments of contraband drugs. But the mayor and his family were also victims of a home invasion by the SWAT team, based entirely on what turned out to be a false premise.

Some of you who read these words may want to argue with me. The police are here to help us you’ll say. Yes, some of them help some people some of the time. Unfortunately the helping is on the decline and the abuse is on the uptick. Survey 100,000 random citizens of the United States before the so called drug war began on their level of trust in the police. That would probably be a pretty high number. Survey 100,000 random citizens now. Most likely the numbers will be pretty low. Chances are that a lot of these people know someone who has been locked up for a consensual non-violent crime. You only have to be beaten up once by uniformed authorities to develop a lifelong distrust of all authorities. You only have to be locked up for a few months to learn to lie to the cops when they come around. After all, they are not your friends. They protect and serve only themselves. That is the lesson many have learned.

Public servants do not shoot family dogs. Peace officers do not initiate violence, they are supposed to prevent it. SWAT teams should be used so sparingly that when they are used, people are amazed. Instead, they are used so frequently it is almost like a car alarm going off - no one pays any attention. We’ve learned to ignore the sights and sounds of our freedom going away.

When the men in masks come to your neighborhood with concrete barriers and rolls of concertina wire just remember that they are there to protect you from yourself. If your family dog gets shot or you get beaten while trying to stop them from raping your daughter or your wife it is your own fault for questioning the authorities. They are just here to deal with pesky drug addicts and you got in the way.

Hmm. Maybe you shouldn’t have been so willing to give away the Constitutional rights of others. Maybe it is time to stand up and let your government know that you aren’t going to tolerate this sort of behavior.

I highly encourage you to carefully read this editorial entitled Clueless in America. Here is a sample:

The nation’s future may depend on how well we educate the current and future generations, but (like the renovation of the nation’s infrastructure, or a serious search for better sources of energy) that can wait. At the moment, no one seems to have the will to engage any of the most serious challenges facing the U.S.

An American kid drops out of high school every 26 seconds. That’s more than a million every year, a sign of big trouble for these largely clueless youngsters in an era in which a college education is crucial to maintaining a middle-class quality of life — and for the country as a whole in a world that is becoming more hotly competitive every day.

Ignorance in the United States is not just bliss, it’s widespread. A recent survey of teenagers by the education advocacy group Common Core found that a quarter could not identify Adolf Hitler, a third did not know that the Bill of Rights guaranteed freedom of speech and religion, and fewer than half knew that the Civil War took place between 1850 and 1900.

Author Bob Herbert mentions that the United States has “one of the highest dropout rates in the industrialized world.” Gee, I wonder if that somehow correlates with the fact that we have the highest per capita number of prisoners in the industrialized world. Whether you’re planning on electing John McCain, Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton is irrelevant to solving the education crisis. None of those individuals are serious about changing our educational landscape. No major politician in the two parties is - educated Americans do not grow government so politicians do not have a real interest in educating Americans.

In all likelihood, what we’ll get from our next President is more empty promises that federal oversight can solve our national overabundance of American dumbasses. I envision proposals to rename No Child Left Behind to something a little more catchy while increasing funding for the program. In 30 years, those few Americans who can still read will look back fondly on the time when this nation had an 80% basic literacy rate. By then, we’ll be a third world nation looking for handouts from India or China.

A perfectly valid question almost no one is asking. This guy is.

Just to be clear: I’m not advocating that steriods be legalized. In fact, I think that’s probably a terrible idea.  I’m simply puzzled. The professional sports establishment is in the midst of a major witchhunt against alleged users of performance enhancing drugs. But no one–so far as I can tell– has articulated a coherent explanation for what should be banned and why.

“James,” one of the commenters on the “Free Fernando Vina” post brought up the issue of Lasik eye surgery. That’s a very good example.  It is perfectly legal for an athlete to undergo “performance enhancing” eye surgery, that moves him from, say, the 50th to the 95th percentile in sight. It is not legal for that same athlete to take “performance enhancing” hormones that move his testosterone from the 50th to the 95th percentile–even thought the additional advantage of the eye surgery may be greater than the additional advantage  conferred by the exogenous testosterone. Now, there may be a perfectly valid distinction between those two interventions. But what is it? Shouldn’t it be spelled out before we drum Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds out of the Hall of Fame?

It is nice to know I’m not the only one confused by the hypocrisy. In my opinion, all performance enhancers should be on the table when it comes to consenting adults. Sports or otherwise. Life might be shorter for some but it would probably be more interesting. Shouldn’t that be their choice as long as they are not hurting anyone else?

The war on drugs has changed the list of readily available substances and enhancements available. It has not done a damn thing to change humans basic desires to be something they are not, to rise higher than they otherwise could have and the propensity of a given subset of our species to flameout in spectacular blazes of glory. Our James Dean and Marilyn Monroe types will always be among us.

When 9/11 happened, I was horrified by the event itself. However, the long-term results of that single event strike much more of a chord of fear in my heart. Government is too big in the United States and 9/11 was an excuse to grow it to levels no one had tried prior to that terrorist attack. 9/11 birthed the Transportation Security Administration, an organization which does little to nothing to improve security when you fly but has made huge inroads in curtailing freedoms that we used to take for granted.

A House of Representatives panel yesterday released a damning report about a Transportation Security Administration Web site built to address grievances from travelers errantly flagged by the government’s no-fly list. It concluded that cronyism and a lack of oversight exposed thousands of site visitors to identity theft.

The news article quoted above goes on to conclude that the TSA is wasting taxpayers money by awarding no-bid contracts and building web sites that expose the public to malicious use of personal data. Sounds like we are less secure because of the TSA, which is the opposite of what we were promised.