The emerging narrative of the Parkland aftermath is clear: greater gun control, and more cops in our schools.  These ideas are would be ineffective at best, and would succeed only in turning schools into prisons, and students into inmates.  But imagine the public funds it would take to pull off this type of domestic militarization, and it’s easy to see why so many powerful industries are rising in its support.

What our public schools need is the presence of members of private security, not more cowards hiding behind a badge, a union, and an “officers bill of rights”.  Protectors of our children should be ones who feel the ever-present fear of accountability, and of losing a paycheck.  After all, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest.  We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages.”

A private security firm doesn’t have the time nor the endless stream of public funds at its disposal to paper over colossal blunders such as the ones committed by law enforcement at every stage leading up to Parkland.  They would almost certainly screen out the cowards in favor of the Frank Castles.

This won’t happen, but it should.  Schools need do need protection, what they don’t need is more government intervention.  I can’t imagine it would be that hard to hire a number of armed, professional guards from a private firm to patrol the school grounds.  There would be no need for far-reaching legislation, no “gun control”.

Nevertheless, it is clear that a narrative is being constructed that is already being wielded in favor of turning public schools into Police States in miniature, which means either more cops, or an expansion of the TSA into our kids’ lives.  More cops in schools mean more interactions between minorities and cops at a younger age.  Which means a greater probability of kids building a rap sheet much earlier in life. It also means conditioning children to accept the Police State they will become acquainted with when they emerge from these prisons as adults.  But it won’t keep them safe. Not from other students, but especially from the institution that will always remain the greatest and most immediate threat to their safety: the State itself.

Just a few thoughts from a caffeine-addled mind.

USA Today: Democratic memo alleges FBI began spying on Carter Page before receiving Steele dossier

The Federalist: Could the police legally do no wrong during the Parkland massacre?

Reason: Florida Gov. Rick Scott calls for more gun control, more cops in schools

Activist Post: Apparently the “solution” to mass shootings is to turn schools into prisons

Express: Funeral parlour looking for ‘volunteers’ for ‘Black Mirror’ project to create immortal AI

The Guardian: Worry less about the march of robots, more about techno panic

CNN: How biometrics is giving identities to ‘invisible citizens’

MintPressNews: Coke, Nestle to privatize world’s second largest aquifer in Brazil

NZ Herald: New series details intelligence failures that led to 9/11

High Times: These 12 states could pass marijuana laws this year

Forbes: If the universe is 13.8 billion years old, how can we see 46 billion light years away?

Discover: Chemists forge custom molecules upon ‘diamond anvils’

NatGeo: Antarctic ice study finds freezing, not melting

Activist Post: Second Florida survivor family now alleging scripted CNN narrative to push gun ban

The Independent: Apple to move iCloud data to China, prompting fears over government access to personal data

FactorDaily: When Big Brother meets Big Data, we’ll live in glass houses

National Review: Is ‘Collusion with Russia’ over?

SHELDON RICHMAN: The tragicomedy of ‘Russiagate’

The Federalist: The Russia probe has turned the news into “Ancient Aliens”

Daily Mail: Army Major facing new probe in Iraqi deaths hands in medals

The Federalist: Full transcript: Tipster warned FBI that Parkland shooter “is going to explode”

Reason: 3 officers made no attempt to enter school and engage shooter

National Review: Excusing cowardice is no path to gun control

Activist Post: State Chinese paper encourages US to restrict guns “to protect human rights”

Zero Hedge: Mexican gun control ensures that the cartels outgun citizens

PAT BUCHANAN: Don’t confiscate guns: protect schools.

Motherboard: Military, FBI, and ICE are customers of controversial “stalkerware”

Techdirt: US border officials have never verified chipped passports, despite demanding their usage

MintPressNews: ‘Mother Jones’ senior reporter asks Medium to silence antiwar leftists

SyFy: What mysteries lurk at Proxima Centauri?

Fox News: Police officers guard home of Florida HS cop who hid outside during shooting

The Federalist: Officer’s hesitation to stop shooting fits a pattern of police cowardice

Miami Herald: How many more in authority failed Stoneman Douglas High School?

Intellectual Takeout: Tech exec doomsday preppers: Protecting themselves from the automation monster they created

Daily Mail: The robot that can read your mind: Creepy ‘Black Mirror’-style machine scans your brain to recreate the face you’re thinking about

Antiwar.com: Let’s acknowledge US interference in foreign elections

USA Today: Free-range kids: Finally, one state lets kids grow up without helicopter parents

National Review: Steel tariffs do not advance national security

CBS: Private company is trying to get Baltimore spy plane in the air again

IBTimes: Militarized spying dolphins? US military wants to recruit sea creatures to spy on enemy submarines

Christian Post: WhatsApp founder donates $50 million to encrypting technology

Zero Hedge: “He never went in”: Officer on duty filmed “doing nothing” during Florida shooting

TheFreeThoughtProject: Officer at different Florida school filmed on rooftop pretending to shoot children

Engadget: China’s Xinjiang surveillance is the dystopian future nobody wants

Daily Signal: US, Microsoft lock horns in international legal battle over privacy rights

Biometric Update: EFF requests clarification, expresses concerns on biometric entry/exit implementation at US border

National Review: Assault weapons preserve the purpose of the Second Amendment

The Federalist: CNN’s insane anti-gun town hall will only help the NRA

MintPressNews: That time the United States dropped bubonic plague on North Korea

The American Conservative: Yemen’s humanitarian crisis and the failure of the Western media

Also TAC: In search of the “short, serious war” unicorn

Consortium News: Time to admit the Afghan war is ‘nonsense’

FEE: How to tell the difference between an entrepreneur and a crony

My Statesman: Amid privacy concerns, ‘virtual’ wall brings powerful spy tech to Texas border:

“In the future imagined by the Department of Homeland Security, an army of small drones will hover over the southwestern border, outfitted with facial recognition technology that can cull criminal histories of people on the ground. Advanced cameras will instantly identify drivers and passengers as they cross international bridges into Mexico. Artificial intelligence software will comb through the social media accounts of immigrants seeking to enter the country.”

It’s not just the US border, as the ACLU has repeatedly reminded us that the “border” extends 100 miles into the US. It should be noted that two-thirds of the US population live within 100 miles of the border. So this technology can and will be used freely on everyone living within that “Constitution-free zone”.

The year-long “investigation” into Russian interference with the US Presidential election has ended with the indictment of 13 Russian nationals connected to a click-bait business operated from Russia.  As Justin Raimondo notes, the indictment is a joke, a pie to his own face and to that of the entire media establishment that promoted the notion that Russia threw the election in Trump’s favor with a few Facebook ads and Twitter accounts.  To think that this sham has been compared to the attack on Pearl Harbor is an outrage.

All 13 Russians are still in Russia, with a snowball’s chance at extradition.  Putin is surely laughing at the entire farce.

Stella Morabito has a very insightful post up at The Federalist today, entitled, 13 Ways Public Schools Incubate Mental Instability In Kids, and cuts to the foundations of the cause for public school violence.  Forced conformity, conveyor-belt mass education, and the “gen pop” environment that breeds identical hierarchical dynamics as those found in US prisons.  And that’s something that should be plainly faced up to: the public school environment and the prison environment are almost identical.  Kids form cliques and gangs, enforce social acceptance or ostracization, and learn to be brutal to each other out of necessity in order to survive this environment.

But these giant schools also do something else, something far more sinister: they condition children to accept total surveillance at a young age.  Schools are basically laboratories for total surveillance, with our kids the test subjects.  Rather than a means to teach them the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic, which would require around a mere 100 hours of attentive instruction, as Morabito explains, our kids are subjected to 17,000 hours inside a warped mini-Police State, only to emerge as adults believing their treatment within those confines can and should be applied to all of society.

The brutal enforcement of conformity among adolescent peers who are confined within an artificial environment for 8 hours every day for years is mentally and emotionally crippling for kids.  And we wonder why they go nuts and either commit suicide or shoot up a school.

Techdirt: Research paper links police unions to increased officer misconduct

Forbes: Revealed: Two secret cogs in the FBI national surveillance machine

The Hill: Dopey Russian ads didn’t swing the election—federal coverups did

RAND PAUL: Is our military budget too small, or is our mission too large?

Reason: Supreme Court case could spell the end of mandatory public sector union dues

Ars Technica: Man removes feds’ spy cam, they demand it back, he refuses and sues

The Federalist: 13 ways public schools incubate mental instability in kids

Motherboard: Top-secret US military base will melt out of Greenland ice sheet

Activist Post: Michigan committee passes bill to ban “material support or resources” for warrantless federal surveillance

247WallSt: 20 companies profiting the most from war

Al Jazeera: Philippine Senator: Duterte’s drug war has killed 20,000

Reason: Countering the threat of the malicious use of artificial intelligence

NBC: Could aliens hack our planet?