For some reason, due to the recent revelation that citizens of Oregon have never pumped their own gas into their vehicles in their lives, those people feel more foreign to me than a Russian or Pole does.  Even they have to drag themselves out of their cars in the ice cold, cursing silently, as they wait for their car to slowly fill up.  But Oregonians have never done this.  Instead, an attendant comes out and does it for them.  Which wouldn’t be bad at all if it were occurring in a free market.  But Oregon’s government has, until recently, mandated that attendants only can pump gas.  The reaction from Oregonians themselves is hilarious, but fascinating:

It’s normal for every single person in most other states to pump their own gas.  Oregon’s citizens know this.  Yet their attitude is one of the above.  Maybe it’s another example of government’s ability to infantilize its population.  And maybe that attitude is not quite representative of all Oregonians.

Planet Biometrics: Somaliland holds biometric presidential election with Irish ID tech

Motherboard: AI-fooling glasses could be good enough to trick facial recognition at airports

The unsettling thought at the back of our minds: Quartz: We should raise AI like parents, not programmers…or they’ll turn into terrible toddlers

Defense World: US army selects Scorpion ScenGen artificial intelligence tech to manage UAS fleet

Activist Post: When will Trump supporters in the freedom movement realize they were duped?

Snowflakes: Techdirt: Indiana legislator wants to force NFL team to hand out refunds to fans ‘offended’ by kneeling players

Defense One: Pentagon seeks laser-powered bat drones

Zero Hedge: Ukraine’s future Nazi leader?

Daily Caller: Judge rules against Fusion GPS bank battle

Related: New York Post: Democrats’ dishonest scramble to disown the Trump ‘dossier’

The American Conservative: Sessions unleashes the hounds on pro-pot states

Forbes: Rate of universe expansion still a mystery

His essays, A Fable for Our Times by One of the Unreconstructed

In Defense of Demagogues

This is in no way a defense of Trump’s ignorant buffoonery, but rather the rare, unfiltered, intelligent subversive who speaks in uncompromising terms.  We want liberty now.  Half-measures and decades of concessions have brought us to the brink of collapse.  There is nothing more to concede.  The future of our children has been tethered to debt we have allowed to accrue, they are born into a Surveillance State continuously at war, forced to use money continuously drained of its value by a central bank.  That there is no compromise with evil is the first lesson to learn in order to restore liberty.  Be unreconstructed.

The Verge: Former NSA contractor to plead guilty over claims he stole 50TB of classified data

Techdirt: DHS expands license plate dragnet, streams collection to US law enforcement agencies

Reason: California is taxing the hell out of pot, but Washington is even greedier

A more humorous take from FEE: California pulls a California on legal marijuana

Also Reason: Trillion-dollar deficit deja vu

NextGov: The Pentagon’s Cloud strategy is “evolving”

FCW: DATA Act review finds errors in $2 billion of DHS transactions

Rare: The Founders would never have trusted the President with sole power to wage nuclear war

Antiwar.com: Pakistan fumes as US announces aid cutoff.  Why not cut off “aid” to every country, everywhere?

Electronic Intifada: Is Israel testing new types of tear gas in Bethlehem? 

NewsOK: Medical marijuana vote set for June

Inside Edition: $1.3 million bottle of vodka-made of gold, silver, and diamonds-stolen from Danish bar

The Week: Why January is secretly the best month for ghost movies

Newsweek: Ancient cave in China filled with 45,000 year-old tools

Tulsa World: Jeff Sessions to end policy that let legal marijuana flourish

Daily Beast: California’s pot queen raided just before legalization

New York Times: Internet users in China expect to be tracked. Now, they want privacy.

Washington Times: Homeland Security data breach compromises personal info of 247,000 DHS employees

CNBC: It reportedly only cost this newspaper a few bucks to access world’s largest biometric data trove

Consortium News: Erasing Obama’s Iran success

Quartz: Death rates among young adults are skyrocketing

Is there anything more terrifying than a dumb person with a gun?  Well, there are, but an armed dumb person is bad, and if they’ve got a badge pinned to their chest, they have the potential to become a living nightmare.  This situation, however, is the norm within the nation’s police departments, who’s officers have a mean IQ score of 104.  That’s not all that low, and not exactly “dumb”,with the mean IQ score for US citizens being 98, but a court ruling from 2000 casts a shadow over the correlation between IQ and employment opportunities within law enforcement.  Basically, the court ruled that the police can refuse to hire someone based on an IQ that is too high. Robert Jordan applied for a job as an officer but was rejected based an IQ score of 125 which was deemed too high.  The court ruled that the department had a right to discriminate based on IQ because it could possibly result in lower turn-over.  Theoretically, smarter people would get bored with police work and quit.  Seems like any company could then discriminate based on IQ, which I believe is within their right, but I also believe something else is at play here.

Smarter people are less likely to be overtaken by emotion, less likely to follow an order that could lead to harm of someone.  It would be interesting to see the IQ score of the SWAT cop who recently murdered a young father-of-two who did nothing more than answer the door, or Philip Brailsford, the Arizona cop who murdered a prone and sobbing Daniel Shaver, also a young father-of-two.  It should be noted that Shaver’s 8-year old daughter said she “wanted to die” so she could be with her daddy.

Brailsford clearly looks like a dim bulb, and has a history of unnecessarily injecting violence into situations.  But it would be interesting to see the results of an IQ test.  I imagine he’s on the left side of the bell curve.

I write this also because of my interactions with police.  While cordial, they are clearly very emotional people.  I don’t believe its the nature of their job, which is safer than most, but rather the screening process.

Could higher intelligence standards, more comprehensive IQ tests, lead to fewer deaths at the hands of American cops?  I have a feeling it could.

Heavily taxing and regulating a plant that anyone can easily grow in their homes doesn’t really sound like wise public policy.  But California is currently attempting it, and I suspect the situation is going to end in only one way: a massive black market in homegrown, untaxed marijuana.  Which means California will actually lose out on millions in revenue.  But while California’s rate is $9.25 per ounce, Washington taxes its weed at a mindboggling $50 per ounce.  How is that really any different from straight-up prohibition?  Cartels, or the elderly couple down the street, will step in and provide tax-free weed, and make a fortune.

This provides a pretty good example of the nature of economics, which is truly is nothing more than refined, and consistently applied, common sense, as Joseph Schumpeter explained to the world.  If it can be easily grown in your home, why not just do that rather than buy an expensive product from a third party? This isn’t the cure for baldness, or cancer, or the iPhone they’re trying to tax at this rate.  It’s a small plant that anyone can grow, anywhere.  Policy makers should ruminate on that for at least a moment before they wave the tax wand.

Ed: It’s my belief that marijuana should be legalized completely, with no tax rate other than the usual sales tax that we pay for everything else.  The only regulation being a prohibition on selling it to kids.  Why not just allow a multi-billion dollar industry to spring up, flourish unrestrained, and create millions of high-paying jobs?  It’s a plant that anyone can grow.  How are you going to regulate and tax that?  Just step back and let the market do its magic.

Don’t be alarmed. I’m currently experimenting with the layout of the site, but the content will always be the same.  If you have suggestions/comments/gripes, send them to digitalsunset86@gmail.com.

Thanks for the page views and welcome to all the new readers.  This site is basically a stripped-down news aggregation site from the point of view of someone deeply affected by the ideas of liberty as espoused by Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Albert Jay Nock, etc.  The point of view, also, from someone involved with the ‘Ron Paul Revolution’ and who holds a desire to complete that peaceful, philosophical revolution in our lifetimes.  It was a true revolution for liberty, the most radical political movement this country has ever seen.  So, there will be news aggregation, but also short commentary, important quotes, important essays, important research.  I will post what I deem “important” from my ‘libertarian’ political perspective, which is nothing more complicated than a desire to see voluntary interaction between consenting adults expanded into as many areas of life as possible.  I’ve written regularly for several publications before, but now, my writing will appear exclusively at Republic Reborn.  I picked this name for this blog because I feel it conveys the attitude, and goal, of Paul’s revolution.  A resurgence of liberty, a dying republic, reborn on the ideals that it was originally founded upon.

In other news, the home of the majority of my writing over the past three years, Red Dirt Report, will be shuttered by its editor in one month.  Here is a link to my articles from there, read them while you can.

Also, the number of page views I wake up to has become alarmingly high, which means I will shortly get my act together and get you early-birds more content. Never fear, and thanks for reading.

Techdirt: Revealed: Vietnam’s 10,000-strong internet monitoring force, tasked with stamping out wrongful views

Law&Liberty: Standing up for free speech on campus

FEE: How an illegal shipping container reshaped the world economy.

Antiwar.com: JUSTIN RAIMONDO: Everybody’s wrong about the Iranian rebellion

More: Activist Post: Something stinks about the Iranian protests, Iran suspicious of demonstration’s roots

Zero Hedge: Anatomy of a crypto-nightmare: Ripple CEO now richer than Zuckerberg

CNBC: North Korea accidentally hit one of its own cities with a ballistic missile last year

Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble: CNBC: Dow breaks above 25,000 for first time ever after strong jobs data

The Federalist: Can the Trump deregulatory boom save the GOP in 2018?

TheNextWeb: This live-stream of an AI learning to play Super Mario is awesome

So sad: Deep Sea News: How we know the Megalodon doesn’t still exist

KIRO-TV: Washington State sues Motel 6 for sharing guest lists with immigration enforcement

ACLU: New documents underscore problems of ‘social media vetting’ of immigrants

FPRI: The FISA section 702 saga: With 702 expired, where do things go from here?

Techdirt: Facebook allowing Israel security forces to shape the news that Palestinians see

ABC Online: Should we be worried about facial recognition?

SecurityInfoWatch: 15 years later, READ ID Act’s vision will finally become reality

iTnews: China to build AI research park

Front lines of the CRISPR revolution: First steps toward CRISPR cure of Lou Gehrig’s disease

Yessssss: CRISPR-editing in cacao plants could save it from extinction

High Times: Did a CNN anchor smoke pot on live TV on New Year’s Eve?

Reason: The War on Terror is a war on Minnesota’s peaceful, entrepreneurial Somali immigrants