Environmentalist groups and celebrities are celebrating “Earth Hour” tonight. They ask that you turn your lights out for an hour, to call attention to global warming. Folks at the Competitive Enterprise Institute suggest that “this sends the wrong message — to plunge us all into darkness as a rejection of technology and human achievement.” In fact, they point out that it’s Earth Hour every night in North Korea, where people lack basic freedoms, as well as affordable, reliable access to many human achievements, such as electricity. Check out this famous photo of environmentally conscious North Koreans observing Earth Hour all night, every night.

CEI rejects the rejection of technology. They have declared the hour between 8:30 and 9:30 tonight to be “Human Achievement Hour.” To join the celebration, just turn your lights on tonight and enjoy the human achievement of light when we want it. And watch CEI’s short video history of human achievement here.

10 Rules for Dealing with Police, the new film from Flex Your Rights, premiered at Cato earlier this week. If you’re interested in knowing more about how to defend your rights during encounters with law enforcement, this is a must-see. You can watch the whole thing below, which includes discussion and commentary after the film.

Order the DVD at FlexY​our​Rights​.com.

Plus, don’t miss the exclusive interview with the star of the film, Baltimore trial attorney Billy Murphy (from HBO’s The Wire).

As Dave Barry would say, I swear I am not making this up.

Yesterday, the Associated Press reported that the Western Hemisphere’s last unreconstructed communist dictator endorsed President Obama’s new health care law:

HAVANA (AP) — It perhaps was not the endorsement President Barack Obama and the Democrats in Congress were looking for.

Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro on Thursday declared passage of American health care reform “a miracle” and a major victory for Obama’s presidency, but couldn’t help chide the United States for taking so long to enact what communist Cuba achieved decades ago.

“We consider health reform to have been an important battle and a success of his (Obama’s) government,” Castro wrote in an essay published in state media, adding that it would strengthen the president’s hand against lobbyists and “mercenaries.”…

“It is really incredible that 234 years after the Declaration of Independence … the government of that country has approved medical attention for the majority of its citizens, something that Cuba was able to do half a century ago,” Castro wrote…

Cuba provides free health care and education to all its citizens, and heavily subsidizes food, housing, utilities and transportation, policies that have earned it global praise. The government has warned that some of those benefits are no longer sustainable given Cuba’s ever-struggling economy, though it has so far not made major changes.

In recent speeches, Raul Castro has singled out medicine as an area where the government needs to be spending less, but he has not elaborated.

I’m sure the Obama administration and its echo chamber will nonetheless continue to claim that this is not socialized medicine.

An airport security staffer faces discipline after using a whole-body imaging machine to ogle a co-worker, according to this report. It’s another signal of what’s to come when the machines are in regular use. (In a previous post, I aired my doubts about the veracity of reports that a famous Indian movie star had been exposed, but the story foretells the future all the same.)

I’ve written before that whole-body imaging machines in airports create risks to privacy despite TSA’s efforts to minimize those risks with carefully designed rules and practices.

Rules, of course, were made to be broken, and it’s only a matter of time — federal law or not — before TSA agents without proper supervision find a way to capture images contrary to policy. (Agent in secure area guides Hollywood starlet to strip search machine, sends SMS message to image reviewer, who takes camera-phone snap. TMZ devotes a week to the story, and the ensuing investigation reveals that this has been happening at airports throughout the country to hundreds of women travelers.)

Rules against misuse of whole-body imaging are fine, but they are not a long-term, effective protection against abuse of “strip-search machines.”

Today President Obama announced an expansion and modification of his Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP). While one can debate the merits of incentives to keep unemployed families in their homes while they search for jobs — I personally believe this will more often than not keep those families tied to weak labor markets — what should be beyond debate is the various bailouts to mortgage lenders contained in the program’s fine print.

Several of the largest mortgage lenders, including some that have already received huge bailouts, carry hundreds of billions worth of second mortgages on their books. As home prices have nationally declined by almost 30 percent, these second mortgages are worthless in the case of a foreclosure. Second mortgages are usually wiped out completely during a foreclosure if the price has decreased more than 20 percent. Yet the Obama solution is now to pay off 6 cents on the dollar for those junior liens. While 6 cents doesn’t sound like a lot, it is a whole lot more than zero, which is what the banks would receive otherwise. Given that the largest lenders are carrying over $500 billion in second mortgages that may need to be written down, we are looking at tens of billions of taxpayer dollars again being funneled to the very banks behind the mortgage crisis.

If that bailout isn’t enough, the new plan increases payments to lenders to not foreclose, all at the expense of the taxpayer. While TARP was passed under Bush’s watch, and he rightly deserves blame for it, Obama continues these bailouts in the name of avoiding a much needed correction in our housing market.

I have one observation about, and one minor difference with, the very good—and very concerning—Wall Street Journal opinion piece by Deborah Peel of Patient Privacy Rights. The piece announces PPR’s “Do Not Disclose” campaign around health information, which will soon be pouring into promiscuous, government-designed “electronic medical records.”

In a January 2009 speech, President Barack Obama said that his administration wants every American to have an electronic health record by 2014, and last year’s stimulus bill allocated over $36 billion to build electronic record systems. Meanwhile, the Senate health-care bill just approved by the House of Representatives on Sunday [now signed into law] requires certain kinds of research and reporting to be done using electronic health records. Electronic records, Mr. Obama said in his 2009 speech, “will cut waste, eliminate red tape and reduce the need to repeat expensive medical tests [and] save lives by reducing the deadly but preventable medical errors that pervade our health-care system.” But electronic medical records won’t accomplish any of these goals if patients fear sharing information with doctors because they know it isn’t private…

Describing how the Health Insurance Portability and Accoutability Act (HIPAA) undermined health privacy, Peel says, “In 2002, under President George W. Bush, the right of a patient to control his most sensitive personal data—from prescriptions to DNA—was eliminated by federal regulators…” Other than the quibble about whether federal law ever gave patients anything that could be genuinely called a right, this is correct and concerning.

What’s interesting is that the policy is routinely ascribed to President Bush (not only by Peel). My suspicion is that blaming President Bush props up the dream that privacy can be maintained in a system that centralizes control of health care—if only the right party is in power.

In fact, the passage of HIPAA in 1996 (under President Bill Clinton) set the course for this outcome. The fact that HIPAA privacy was undone during the Bush administration is a coincidence convenient for his ideological and political opponents. If I’m mistaken, the proof will be the reversal of the policy during the current administration. I’m not aware of any plan for that to happen.

“Electronic record systems that don’t put patients in control of data or have inadequate security create huge opportunities for the theft, misuse and sale of personal health information,” says Peel. I agree, but more importantly, I think, public policies that don’t put patients in control create the same—or at least parallel—problems.

Transferring control of health care to the federal government transfers control of health information to the federal government. The government has interests distinct from patients, and no matter how hard one fights to protect patients’ privacy interests, the government’s interests in cost control, social engineering, and such will ineluctably win out.

Public policies that restore power to patients will restore health privacy to patients. A decade or two of exploring alternatives to patient empowerment may drive the lesson home.

As a follow-on to my post yesterday, I’ve been working on two charts using data from the International Institute of Strategic Studies to compare U.S. military spending with that of our European allies. I’m grateful to Charles Zakaib for his help crunching the numbers.

I think that the charts are pretty evocative.

The chart below combines data showing the growth of U.S. defense spending (DoD only) as a share of GDP, and a corresponding decline among all other NATO countries. Please note that NATO member states are supposed to spend at least 2 percent of GDP on defense.

The second chart shows changes in defense spending per capita over the same period. I’ve always thought this figure more instructive than spending as a percent of GDP. You can see that Americans are spending much more on our military over the past 10 years, whereas most of our European allies have made only modest increases.

These charts aren’t perfect because there are some inconsistencies in the data. Different countries include different things under “defense” and this can lead to misunderstating what they spend relative to others, including the United States. For example, the figures for France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Greece, Belgium and Portugal include military pensions, but other countries do not. The stats for other countries (Turkey, Albania, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Iceland, Luxembourg, Romania and Slovenia) count coast guards and/​or gendarmerie (aka national police) under defense spending, but in the United States some of those costs are covered under the Department of Homeland Security (especially the Coast Guard; we obviously don’t have a federal police force).

Using IISS data (shown below), I conclude that a comparable figure for U.S. national security spending, broadly defined, totaled $835.1 billion in 2008. That translates into over $2,700 per person, and is 5.88% of GDP.

• Nationall Defense Budget Authority: $674.7B
• Nuclear Weapons (Department of Energy): $16.6B
• Other non-DoD: $4.9B
• Department of Homeland Security: $50.6B
• Veterans Affairs: $88.3B
• TOTAL: $835.1B

One could quarrel with my including all of the DHS budget as “national security spending.” Others might dispute that all of the VA’s budget should be counted. But while I might have misconstrued a detail here or there, the bottom line is clear: the gap between what we spend, and what others spend, is growing. The open question is what, if anything, we are prepared to do about it.