Glancing up to see a ‘Ron Paul for President’ hoodie meandering through my place of work was vertigo-inducing, to say the least.  More so when he came directly up to me with a question, bypassing others closer by and more capable at giving assistance.  I answered his question flatly, but walked with him, confessing my admiration for Paul and involvement in the two campaigns.  Surprise registered on his face, followed by a shadow, then good-natured resignation.  We had never met before, yet we both saw in each other ghosts of our respective pasts.  Strange meeting there, on a New Year’s Eve, five years after hope died for Paul’s campaign.  “They’re all still there, they just need someone to lead them”, were his last words before leaving.  I wished him well, but disagreed entirely with his sentiment.  What Paul created became something more than him.  He didn’t lead, he began a revolution and stepped aside as we took over.  Someone can start a wildfire, but they aren’t themselves the flames.  I don’t like this attitude that so many have of waiting around for a savior, a prophet, a god, to drag them out and give them a religion to fight for.  What we fight for is a world without a king, equals under the law, not subjects of a crown.  A revolution for liberty should be no different.  Ron Paul’s revolution was never about Paul himself.  He gave us our black flag, but we flew it.  Some still are.  But they’re jaded in the way my acquaintance was.  He sees an end, but it feels like a beginning, like something cycling back around, a boomerang thrown a decade into the future.  It’s coming back around, you’ve better not given up on it.

“Let it not be said that we did nothing. Let not those who love the power of the welfare/warfare state label the dissenters of authoritarianism as unpatriotic or uncaring. Patriotism is more closely linked to dissent than it is to conformity and a blind desire for safety and security. Understanding the magnificent rewards of a free society makes us unbashful in its promotion, fully realizing that maximum wealth is created and the greatest chance for peace comes from a society respectful of individual liberty.”-Ron Paul

EFF: Communities from coast to coast fight for control over police surveillance

New York Times: How do you vote? 50 million Google images give a clue

Cointelegraph: Kidnapping of bitcoin exchange executive showed importance of financial privacy

Activist Post: Top 5 stories buried or deliberately ignored by mainstream media in 2017

Kansas City Star: These stories missed in 2017 will have a global impact

Techcrunch: Hyperscale data centers reached over 390 worldwide in 2017

Forbes: Big Burger is watching you, and other ways facial recognition software is entering food service

Interesting Engineering: Google’s new voice AI is hyper realistic

Popular Mechanics: This robot picks tomatoes better than you ever could

Futurism: Dark future: Here’s when we’ll have the autonomous guard dogs from Black Mirror

Gadgets Now: Phones set to get smarter in 2018 with futuristic tech

Zero Hedge: Why US foreign policy will re-ignite extremism in 2018

Also Zero Hedge: Police fatality rate drops to second lowest level in 50 years

FEE: Is America a Police State?

James Herrigan and Anthony Davies ask an important question, one asked many times before, yet in their case it seems to be rhetorical.  They note an instance of gratuitous brutality committed against an elderly couple by violent men who happened to get hired as cops.  All over hibiscus, which a busybody insurance agent mistook for marijuana.  Yes, if police can do this level of damage and face no consequences, then we are living in a Police State.  If all of us are exposed to this level of wanton violence at the hands of law enforcement, with little to no professional repercussions felt by law enforcement after the fact, then it reinforces that behavior, and seems to prove that we are indeed living in a Police State.  When even body camera footage of clear-cut murder isn’t enough to convict a cop, or when a department’s decision to terminate an officer for abuse can be overridden by the cop union, then the answer is yes.  The solution is more civilian oversight, abolition of police unions in their entirety, and immediate termination of the offending officer, while also barring them from ever wearing a badge again.  The public’s safety is at stake, after all.

Ed: To the several hundred daily visitors to this blog, many new, welcome and thank you for the page views.  This is more or less a “news aggregation” blog, from the point of view of a single person.  It will always be so.  Not to say that I have an eye for editing, but what I do have is a perspective on current events that could be labeled “libertarian”.  I am for liberty, in the sense that Mises, Rothbard, Hayek, Rand, Spencer, Nock, and many, many others meant it.  I am for a voluntary society, in the sense that I wish to see the legalization of every single voluntary act between consenting adults.  Not merely because a strict defense of voluntary interaction affords respect and dignity to each individual, but because of the endless prosperity that emerges from a society that treats each individual as an end unto themselves.  Every societal ill of our time stems from a restriction of one or more voluntary interactions, or, a violation of the liberty and dignity of a group of people.  The crises of our time, therefore, could be easily solved by banishing these myriad artificial restrictions, and allowing the resulting flood of social power to correct the mistakes of the world’s states.  Barring a stroke, dementia, the loss of my fingers, or death, this is the perspective that this blog will operate from for the duration.

From her book, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World:

“Nor during the Age of Innovation have the poor gotten poorer, as people are always saying. On the contrary, the poor have been the chief beneficiaries of modern capitalism. It is an irrefutable historical finding, obscured by the logical truth that the profits from innovation go in the first act mostly to the bourgeois rich.”

It’s easy to see the riches bestowed upon some inventor/entrepreneur.  What’s difficult to see is how that individual’s actions enriched the world.  We pay for goods and services that we could never create on our own, filling the coffers of someone far removed from our daily lives.  Yet who benefits? The answer is that we both benefit.  I value my money less than what I wish to buy with it.  The grocery store, or appliance store, or cafe, values their product less than my money.  It is a win-win, positive sum interaction.  The unrestrained market economy consists of billions of such positive-sum interactions on a daily basis.  To understand that is to understand the miracle of free trade.

The Intercept: Facebook says it is deleting accounts at the direction of the U.S. and Israeli governments

ABC News: Artificial intelligence is learning from our encounters with nature–and that’s a concern

Economic Times: The fight for privacy in this connected age

Sky News: Surveillance devices hidden in everyday items

The Nation: Russiagate is devolving into an effort to stigmatize dissent

Library of Economics and Liberty: Bombing makes people mad

Cato: Gasoline on a fire: why arms sales to the Ukraine are a really bad idea

The New Republic: The decline of debate on college campuses

Defense News: 2018 Pentagon priority: Speeding up foreign weapons sales

Reason: Three things to like about 2017

Forbes: Big Data: Back to the future

NY Mag: What the NYT UFO story actually reveals

The Guardian: E-cigs are definitely safer than smoking

Forbes: A trip to Alpha Centauri would change the world

Zero Hedge: Pot industry revitalizes entire Canadian town’s economy

The Sun: Psychedelic drug LSD set for comeback as workers turn to ‘microdosing’ to boost brainpower

NYT: Santa is a psychedelic mushroom Ed: Slightly dated but glorious

Toronto Star: U.S. government’s email surveillance survives years after Edward Snowden blew the whistle

StateScoop: Facial recognition technology deployed by feds at 9 airports draws skepticism

Market Insider: AI meets a shopping mall

The Libertarian Republic: Unsealed court docs show how prosecutors tried to rig Bundy trial

Forbes: Let’s never let the Left live down its absurd ‘Net Neutrality’ alarmism

Antiwar.com: JUSTIN RAIMONDO: Liberals getting back in touch with their authoritarian roots

FEE: Is there a link between ADHD and creative thinking?

Vox: This military explosive is poisoning American soil

Slate: It was a big year for AI

Motherboard: ‘Wormwood’ is an LSD-soaked true crime masterpiece

“There’s a reason we separate military and police. One fights the enemy of the state, the other serves and protects the people.  When the military becomes both, the enemies of the state tend to become the people.”  -William Adama, Battlestar Galactica

Swatting, the act of calling in a fake hostage situation in order have a SWAT team sent to someone’s home, has been a trend among gamers for year, but it hasn’t gotten anyone killed until last night in Wichita, Kansas.  Apparently, a Call of Duty gamer threatened to swat another, so the threatened gamer gave him an address other than his own.  The first gamer called in a hostage situation, a SWAT team arrived, and as the dad answered the door, one cop gunned him down.  Plenty of heat has rightfully been aimed at the gamers for engaging in such a reckless stunt, but not enough blame has been placed on the idiots who actually show up, jacked up on an out-of-control adrenaline high, and let bullets fly.  The cop who pulled the trigger is a seven-year “veteran” of that particular department.  Simply, he should be charged with murder.  The victim was a 28-year old father of two, for chrissake.  It was not a “mistake”, that “will never happen again”. It was plain, clear-cut, murder.  Police should not continue to get away with gunning down fathers, in the way that Philip Brailsford got away with murdering a sobbing, compliant Daniel Shaver in a hotel hallway.

Police are armed agents of the State.  They hold the power of life or death over all of us; therefore they should be controlled as tightly as possible.  When the armed agents of foreign countries murder their own citizens, we are rightfully outraged.  Why not here as well, when it’s our own country?  When an officer misbehaves, abuses his power, murders those he or she is charged with protecting, they should be punished, and most certainly never allowed near a badge and gun again.  Yet most of the police involved in these types of incidents have a history of abuse of power that slowly increases in magnitude, meaning its easy to predict which cop might end up going too far.  Brailsford had a history of roughing up people for no reason, yet he got to keep his badge.  It’s a virtual certainty that the Wichita cop that murdered the young dad on his doorstep had all the warning signs that were ignored by his department.

And to go slightly off the rails, the SWAT team itself should be abolished.  A police force engaging in military cosplay, but with real machine guns, grenades, and tanks, and has no place in a free society.  This same force descending on the homes of the innocent, and everyone is innocent until proven guilty, is a clear marker of a Police State.  And the automatic defense of murderous police appears to be a clear sign of Stockholm Syndrome.

SWAT teams are deployed over 80,000 times each year within our borders.  This means police, armed with weapons appropriate only on a battlefield, kicking down doors, gunning down pets, and generally letting bullets fly any which way.  And with no accountability. Which means it will continue to happen.  Which means more hideous body cam videos like the one depicting Daniel Shaver’s murder by the psychotically calm Brailsford.  It could end now, if only civilians gained control of their police force, the way it should be in a free society.

EFF: Court challenges to NSA surveillance: 2017 in review

Gizmodo Australia: The great data breach disasters of 2017

China Digital Times: China building DNA database by controversial means

Daily Signal: Invasive new airport screenings may put privacy at risk

Techdirt: Prosecutors benefiting most from police body cameras

Also Techdirt: Hawaiian Supreme Court says the First Amendment protects filming the police

National Review: Masterpiece Cakeshop and the slippery slope of anti-discrimination law

Also National Review: Security theater comes to Disney World Resort

The American Conservative: 2017: The year the Left went into eclipse

The Libertarian Institute: Recommendations for police reform

Gadgets Now: 2017: When artificial intelligence outsmarted humans

MIT Tech Review: 2017: The year AI floated into the cloud

Futurism: NASA expert says this is the ultimate test for AI in space exploration

Quartz: Data shows US inventors aren’t just good at science, they also come from rich families

Science Nordic: Can large objects exist in a quantum state?

NPR: How Caribbean pirates hijacked America’s metric system

Mises Institute: Why we read dead economists

Having an odd habit of sticking with a single writer for weeks at a time has its benefits, mainly due to the discovery of gems that would otherwise go unnoticed.  Reading several Nock essays each day for a week gets you through a large chunk of his work, and one of his best is “Prohibition and Civilization“, an essay where Nock describes the ugly sterility of a society that attempts such feats of social control as alcohol prohibition:

“Prohibition, as a policy, has had a great deal of public attention, but the kind of civilization connoted by prohibition has had very little. This is unfortunate, because the general civilization of a community is the thing that really recommends it. The important thing to know about Kansas, for instance, is not the statistics of prohibition—as most writers on the subject seem to think — but whether one would really want to live there, whether the peculiar type of civilization that expresses itself through prohibition is really attractive and interesting(…)

(…)By far the greater part of the power and permanence of a civilization resides in its charm. It is surely noticeable, for instance, that wherever French civilization once strikes root, it remains forever. The border provinces, the Province of Quebec and our own State of Louisiana, are as obstinately and unchangeably French as ever they were. The reason is that French civilization satisfied the human instinct for what is amiable, graceful and becoming, and men cleave to it. It appeals to them as something lovely and desirable, rather than as something merely rational and well-ordered, which is the chief appeal of the German type. Under the State Socialism of Germany one is continually confronted with the social relations and consequences of practically every move one makes. The principle of prohibition is extended to cover an endless range of conduct (though, significantly, drink is exempt). The home scheme of social fife is ordered with excellent and obvious rationality, but it is devoid of charm, it has no savor, and all its reasonableness cannot make up for the deficiency, cannot make the normal spirit really enjoy it. One feels the same restlessness and perverseness under it that William James declared he felt under the regime at Chautauqua. One doubts whether such smooth-running social order is worth having at the price. I remember some years ago, after a long time spent in observing the ghastly perfections of German municipal machinery, I came home ready to rejoice in the most corrupt, ring-ridden and disreputable city government that I could find in America, if only I might draw a free breath once more and forget the infinity of things that are verboten.

(…)The civilization of Socialism, however, is rational. It has that sound merit, just as civilization of one Latin type has the merit of beauty and amiability. But Puritan civilization has neither. It has all the flat hideousness of Socialism, without the rationality which Socialism has managed to redeem by its contact with great world-currents of thought. Puritanism is essentially a hole-and-corner affair, with its arid provincialism untempered by contact of any kind. Its ideals are grotesque and whimsical; its methods are unintelligent—the methods of dragooning. Mr. Keeler must forgive my plain speaking; it comes of a sincere desire to resolve his doubts about the sanity or integrity of the brute mass of us who look unmoved on the progress of prohibition in Kansas. We cannot accept prohibition without accepting the civilization that goes with it, for prohibition cannot stand on any other soil. To get even the attenuated benefit of prohibition in Kansas, our community-life must become more or less like that of Kansas, and we ourselves more or less like Kansans; and this is wholly impossible and unthinkable.

(…)The advocates of prohibition ought to get a clear grasp of the fundamental objection to their theory, and meet it with something more substantial than feeble talk about the influence of “the liquor interests.” Our objection is to Puritanism, with its false social theory taking shape in a civilization that, however well-ordered and economically prosperous, is hideous and suffocating. One can at least speak for oneself: I am an absolute teetotaler, and it would make no difference to me if there were never another drop of liquor in the world; and yet to live under any regime of prohibition that I have so far had opportunity to observe would seem to me an appalling calamity. The ideals and instruments of Puritanism are simply unworthy of a free people, and, being unworthy, are soon found intolerable. Its hatreds, fanaticisms, inaccessibility to ideas; its inflamed and cancerous interest in the personal conduct of others; its hysterical disregard of personal rights; its pure faith in force, and above all, its tyrannical imposition of its own Kultur: these characterize and animate a civilization that the general experience of mankind at once condemns as impossible, and as hateful as it is impossible.

The American Conservative: Dirtboxes: The newest government tool for warrantless privacy invasion

Rare.us: Rand Paul led the Senate fight against renewing warrantless surveillance and won

The Hill: Europe’s privacy law set to change how personal data is handled around the globe

Coindesk: Privacy on the blockchain: Where are we headed?

EFF: Nation-state hacking: 2017 in review

National Interest: The fentanyl crisis is a reverse opium war

RCP: Did the FBI conspire to stop Trump?

The Hill: Obamacare proves surprisingly resilient

Antiwar.com: Russia says US training former ISIS fighters to destabilize Syria

The American Conservative: Afghanistan: War without a rationale

Reason: Sorry Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg: If Daniel Ellsberg is a hero, so is Edward Snowden

Daily Beast: The secret KGB manual for recruiting spies

Forbes: 2018: The year we see our first black hole