Britain is 1984.  From TNW News.  Relevant chunk:

“…in the UK, the government is trying to push through a draconian law that would force internet service providers and technology giants to build secret security flaws into their technology to allow them to be accessed by police and the security services on demand.”

From AEI.  A nice graph in the article depicts the GDP “hockey stick”, the millenia where the GDP was roughly the same for the human race, then the sharp rise in GDP per person around 1750.  The normalization of relatively free trade is to praise.

Yikes.  From Reuters.  Relevant chunks:

“Federal prosecutors declined to bring charges against law enforcement officers in the United States facing allegations of civil rights violations in 96 percent of such cases between 1995 and 2015, according to an investigation by the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review newspaper.

The newspaper examined nearly 3 million U.S. Justice Department records related to how the department’s 94 U.S. attorney’s offices across the country, and in U.S. territories including Puerto Rico, handled civil rights cases against officers…

…Overall, prosecutors turned down 12,703 potential civil rights violations out of 13,233 total complaints. By contrast, prosecutors rejected only about 23 percent of referrals in all other types of criminal cases, the newspaper said.”  The newspaper referred to is the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

From Truthdig.  Relevant chunks:

“The Pentagon recently announced that it was refusing to carry a new book by journalist (and veteran) Joseph Hickman in the stores on U.S. military bases. It’s called The Burn Pits: The Poisoning of America’s Soldiers.

Burn pits, NPR reports, are “acres-wide mounds of waste near bases” containing “everything from batteries to vehicle scraps to amputated body parts.” These refuse piles, once set aflame with jet fuel, can burn for 24 hours a day. They expose our troops and other personnel to deadly toxic fumes…

…Hickman’s Burn Pits exposes a link between military service near burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan and serious maladies, including everything from respiratory illnesses to rare brain cancers. Indeed, Hickman says, Vice President Joe Biden’s son Beau died of one of these rare brain cancers after serving in Iraq.”

Drug spending went up 12.6% from 2013 to 2014, and is expected to outpace overall healthcare spending into 2018.

From National Memo.  State by State, marijuana legalization is wounding the Prohibition State, but it is far from dead.

From the BBC.  The Political Class loves Empire more than it hates the barnacles it picks up along the way, however, and it will tolerate them as long as they help it to tighten their grip on the world.

Black Swan author Nassim Taleb on the current election cycle.

From Task and Purpose.

From Radley Balko’s blog at WaPo.  Relevant chunk: “This basically formalizes what was already happening under the radar. We’ve known for a couple of years now that the Drug Enforcement Administration and the IRS were getting information from the NSA. Because that information was obtained without a warrant, the agencies were instructed to engage in “parallel construction” when explaining to courts and defense attorneys how the information had been obtained. If you think parallel construction just sounds like a bureaucratically sterilized way of saying big stinking lie, well, you wouldn’t be alone. And it certainly isn’t the only time that that national security apparatus has let law enforcement agencies benefit from policies that are supposed to be reserved for terrorism investigations in order to get around the Fourth Amendment, then instructed those law enforcement agencies to misdirect, fudge and outright lie about how they obtained incriminating information — see the Stingray debacle. This isn’t just a few rogue agents. The lying has been a matter of policy. We’re now learning that the feds had these agreements with police agencies all over thecountry, affecting thousands of cases.”

The War on Terror is about grabbing power while the government can, once it’s accumulated it’s almost impossible to take away.