Wikipedia, Reddit, and other popular websites all went black today to protest SOPA and PIPA, two bills currently before Congress. Critics charge that the bills could potentially shut down the Internet as we know it. Associate Director of Technology Studies Ryan Radia explains how the bills would work, and how they would indeed stifle free speech.

Quebec officials are starting to listen in on what children are talking about on school playgrounds during recess. Are they trying to catch wind of terrorist plots? Stamp out juvenile drug use? Put a stop to bullying? None of the above, actually:

Diane De Courcy, the board’s chairwoman, said the approach will be persuasive, not punitive.

“There will be no language police,” she said. Instead, monitors who overhear children using their mother tongue during recess will simply remind them of the rules.

“If they are automatically switching to another language, (the monitor) will gently tap them on the shoulder – not on the head – to tell them, ‘Remember, we speak French. It’s good for you.’

Yes, speak French. It’s good for you.

A kindlier, more tolerant, and more realistic view is that people – even children – are perfectly capable of deciding for themselves which language they shall speak. Let them.

The conflict sketched in these pages appears as a war between light and darkness. We exclaim that altar and throne formed a sinister conspiracy against the progress of humanity.

J.B. Bury, A History of Freedom of Thought, p. 177.

“If the history of civilization has any lesson to teach it is this: there is one supreme condition of mental and moral progress which it is completely within the power of man himself to secure, and that is perfect liberty of thought and discussion. The establishment of this liberty may be considered the most valuable achievement of modern civilization, and as a condition of social progress it should be deemed fundamental.”

-J.B. Bury, A History of Freedom of Thought, p. 182.

Granted, I didn’t see any headlines about any of those things. No, the evidence for Rep. Moore’s achievements is much more indirect: he found the time to introduce a bill banning offensive bumper stickers. Surely he wouldn’t spend time on something like that unless he’d already solved his state’s more pressing matters?

There’s no way that fining drivers $50 if another driver takes issue with their bumper sticker would take precedence over reforming TennCare. The bumper sticker bill also covers movies being shown inside vehicles; surely Nashville’s solons wouldn’t worry about what cartoons parents are showing their kids in the back of their minivans until they found a way to raise stagnant standardized test scores.

On the other hand, maybe Tennesseans would be better off if their elected officials spent all of their time on minutiae. Whenever legislators do try to tackle the big issues of the day, wallets across the state get a lot lighter.

Have a listen here.

Did the Citizens United decision place corporations ahead of democracy? Activist Annie Leonard thinks so. CEI’s Communications Director Lee Doren disagrees. Leonard views a strong government as an opposing force to corporate power. Doren points out in a new video that the more government does, and the more it spends, the more companies will flock to Washington to get a piece of the action. If you want to keep money out of politics, then keep politics out of our money.

Hillary Clinton: WikiLeaks release an ‘attack on international community’

Have a listen here.

Associate Director of Technology Studies Ryan Radia gives his take on a Supreme Court case concerning California’s ban of violent video game sales to minors. Keeping such things away from children is traditionally a job for parents.

The case has implications that reach far beyond video games. Because censorship is such a subjective thing, allowing it could have a chilling effect on forms of expression from art to music to film. The First Amendment specifically prohibits the government from sanitizing culture. That is up to the people themselves.

The Washington Post has a breathless write-up of this year’s midterm election spending:

In the latest sign of this year’s record-breaking election season, an independent research group estimated Wednesday that candidates, parties and outside interest groups together could spend up to $4 billion on the campaign.

$4 billion is a lot of money. The Post’s opinion staff writer thinks that’s frightening. $4 billion, of course, comes to $12.90 per person in a nation of 310 million people. So maybe not.

A bit more context: federal spending costs $11,290.32 per person. Regulation costs another $5,645.16 per person. That’s a total burden of $16,935.48 per person. American democracy is a very expensive form of government with surprisingly inexpensive elections.

Spending $12.90 to influence $3.5 trillion in spending and another $1.75 trillion in regulating seems like too little election spending, not too much. Total election spending is about the same as it was in 2000, when the federal budget was under $2 trillion.

Still, for a midterm, this year’s election spending is historically high. And a lot of people think there is too much money in politics. Fortunately, there is a surefire way for them to fix the problem: get politics out of our money.

Republicans and Democrats alike have made it clear that they have little interest in fundamental economic reform. So maybe the Post is right that they aren’t worth spending $12.90 on.

Unfortunately, as long as the Bush-Obama spending and regulating binge continues, people will be spending a lot more than $12.90 to get a piece of the action.

President Obama has caused a stir recently by declaring that the Chamber of Commerce, which is running ads critical of his policies, is funded with foreign money.

It’s a weak criticism. And not just because the amount of foreign money involved is trivial. Or because labor unions and other political groups across the spectrum also accept small amounts of foreign money.

President Obama seems to be saying that people are smart enough to know whether or not a candidate or a political party is bamboozling them in their campaign ads. But people suddenly lose their wits when an outside group, or – gasp! – someone from another country does the exact same thing. That kind of cognitive dissonance must be difficult to live with.

Because arguments against foreign money in politics are so weak, people who use those arguments are either ill-informed or lying.

Lying is much more likely in this case. If your own arguments are weak, a common tactic is to distract your audience and hope they don’t notice. It works more often than not. Here, President Obama is taking advantage of the fact that almost all people suffer from anti-foreign bias. Not racism. Anti-foreign bias. They’re different. And pandering to that bias can be extremely useful politically.

Why does such a cheap tactic work? It’s because anti-foreign bias is in our DNA. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived in small bands. Anybody outside that band was a very real threat to steal food, clothing, or potential mates. So people learned to be wary of outsiders. It was good for one’s life expectancy.

As tribes became villages, towns, cities, and now nations, the number of people we consider insiders has grown. And we treat outsiders much better than we used to. Trade is more common than war in most places. But most people are still instinctively leery of outsiders. It is our nature.

That’s why it’s disappointing to see President Obama so cynically play that card. Clearly he and the Chamber of Commerce prefer different policies. It would be nice to see the President engage the Chamber at a higher level than the ad hominem.