In the previous post I mentioned that most of the employees at public schools are women.  It wasn’t meant as a drawback, and I wouldn’t send my young children to schools where the majority of instructors were men.  I meant mainly that they were probably physically less strong than a psychotic male, teenage shooter(they’re pretty much all male).  Despite that, their level-headedness during these situations; locking the door, keeping their class quiet is heroic. Again, assigning private security according the number of students would be a fairly wise step in the right direction.

Now.  The FBI was tipped off about the Florida shooter’s desire to massacre a school a month ago, but “didn’t follow protocols”. Someone close to shooter Cruz apparently detailed to the FBI Cruz’s crazed social media posts and clear desire to shoot up a school, but nothing came of it, and now Florida governor Rick Scott is rightly asking FBI Director Christopher Wray to resign following such a massive screw-up.  And if Wray were decent, he would do it.  But in all probability, he’s not, and he won’t.  Because, after all, the FBI is working overtime to pin a fantastical Russian conspiracy theory on Trump, and doesn’t have time to devote to real situations.  And their lack of attention to true pressing matters has resulting in 17 kids dead at the hands of someone that they could’ve stopped.

BUT. But.  This is all to place an unjustified faith in our government to keep us safe.  And this is clearly an example of how our safety isn’t their priority, which means it’s up to us to keep ourselves and our children safe.  Asking Trump to “do something” is meaningless.  Clamoring for stricter gun control is meaningless.  The problem most of us have is an unjustified faith in ‘other people’ to keep us and our kids safe.  That responsibility falls on us, as is the responsibility to not believe government when it says it will keep us safe.  ‘Gun control’ isn’t what prevents society from devolving into some Mad Max-style dystopia.  Governments do little more than steal from and surveil those that elect them.  Our safety isn’t their priority, so we should stop pretending it is.

Ed: This site gets a flurry of clicks sometime after 8pm, and continues to go up until around 2am.  I appreciate the night owls, as I am one as well.  I’ll continue to post every morning, but I will also begin tailoring/increasing content for the night crowd as well.  Thanks for the views.

The focus right now is, as usual, on the relative ease of access that most adult Americans have to guns, in the wake of the Florida shooting. I’d like to point to two alternative enabling factors that explain these sudden mass shootings on public school campuses:

First, schools are relatively unprotected.  I speak from experience.  A couple of middle-aged ladies in an office can’t guard an almost all-glass door against a madman (why do schools have so many top-to-bottom glass doors?) and protect a school filled with hundreds of kids from kindergarten through fifth grade.  It’s always boggled my mind that we send the most precious people in our lives to institutions filled with unlocked doors and (mostly) women without the means to defend them if necessary.

Secondly, public schools create an artificially toxic environment that tribalizes children.  Force kids into an unnatural social environment, especially junior high and high school, and they begin forming social strata, conformity, and then enforcing that conformity with persistent ridicule and bullying.  The ridiculed and the bullied are forced to endure it 8 hours a day, every day of the week.  It’s really no wonder that suicide rates skyrocket during the school year, and some of the bullied or ostracized snap and shoot up a school.

The solution to the first would be to create safer schools, with private security patrolling the grounds.  The emphasis here is on private security, as opposed to cops.  A private security contractor works for a private company, not the government.  He wouldn’t be unionized, he would have far better and more comprehensive training than a cop, and there would be far more accountability for any misconduct.  There would be none of the silliness about the private contractor being your kid’s ‘friend’ as there is with the police.  He would be there to do one thing: protect the school. He wouldn’t be arresting kids, putting them in handcuffs, or milking them for self-incriminating information.

The solution to the second is trickier, because it strikes at the foundation of the entire public school system.  Middle- and high-schoolers can be unbelievably cruel to each other, especially if they know their tribe is backing them up.  And of course they can bully someone to the point that the individual either kills themselves or kills other students.  These bullies are a threat to everyone, if their behavior pushes someone to the point that they consider an attack.  Public school is the State’s propaganda pipeline to the minds of the young of this country, so it won’t die any time soon, so the only option we have as parents is to pay attention to our children and look for signs of bullied or bullying behavior, and to get them out of that warped environment with their sanity intact while there’s still time.

The Week: Trump’s anti-immigrant enforcers want to team up with Trump’s spies

EFF: Customs and Border Protection’s biometric data snooping goes too far

Consortium News: NYT’s “really weird” Russiagate story

More believable: Reuters: Russia says it has evidence of Western meddling in Russian election

The Hill: George W. Bush doesn’t deserve the media’s efforts at rehabilitation

SHELDON RICHMAN: ‘Peace through strength’ is a racket

Reason: None of these popular gun control proposals would have stopped the Parkland shooting

Are guns a danger to our kids, or is the real danger the public school system? Public School Control Now!

Techdirt: FBI Director still won’t say which encryption experts are advising him on his bizarre approach to encryption

Mises: Why don’t schools have better security? Ed: Bars have better security than our public schools

Reason: More cops in schools is the wrong answer to mass shootings Ed: Private, non-unionized, highly-trained, mentally-stable security employees that can be held accountable.

Washington Times: Federal government spending at a rate of $1 million a minute

Mashable: Over a decade later, FBI surveillance of Iraq War protests still resonates

The Federalist: The media stopped reporting the Russian collusion story because they helped create it

Mashable: Nvidia is creating surveillance cameras with built-in facial recognition

Collective Evolution: MK Ultra: What they didn’t tell you about the program that’s probably still operational

Motherboard: Forget Boston Dynamics robot dogs: Purdue’s microbots are the real nightmare

InHomelandSecurity: China’s Surveillance State now a ‘creepy’ technological reality

USA Today: After Apple’s fight with the FBI, two groups say they can solve the encryption battle

Washington Examiner: Why are the Comey memos secret?

Reason: If you owe the IRS over $51,000, it can trap you in the United States

Buffalo: Daniel Ellsberg shed light on the Pentagon Papers, now he’s doing the same with nuclear war

Techdirt: What are the ethical issues of Google conducting AI research in China?

Nature: The quantum internet is coming

EFF: Catalog of missing devices illustrates gadgets that could and should exist, were it not for bad copyright law

GovTech: Activists file lawsuit over LAPD’s predictive policing program

Bonnie Kristian, one of the greatest writers of my generation, writes on the illogic of handing the Pentagon more money than ever before, despite it’s clear inability to wisely spend the money it already receives

Civil asset forfeiture is an easy source of revenue for unscrupulous members of law enforcement, and they will actively work to prevent any change to that arrangement, as this example out of Alabama shows

WSWS: British judge refuses to overturn Assange’s arrest warrant

CNBC: It’s not just lizards in Iran—squirrels, cats, and dolphins have also been tagged as spies over the years

The Federalist: The Left is conditioning college students to hate free speech

The Quint: Can you really prevent Google from spying on you?

Quartz: What we miss about AI when we’re worried about killer robots

The solution to eliminating whatever threat our leaders believe that North Korea poses to our precious bodily fluids is also the simplest: remove all trade restrictions, tear down the Berlin Wall-style barrier between North and South, and allow them to talk.  It removes the risk of a devastating war in which millions of innocents were perish over the course of several years, it would save North Korea from starvation, and it would slowly allow unfiltered news from the outside world to seep into that Hermit Kingdom.  Trade would transform the country for better, in a way that no other option could.  And it wouldn’t cost a thing.  BUT. But.

Washington D.C. is shopping for a war.  War means justifying future $700 billion “defense” budgets that are divvied up among an entire industry that is devoted to waging war.  That industry is what we call the military-industrial complex. That industry needs enemies, needs constant wars around the globe.  Conflict is good for business.  And peace is bad, not only for business, but also power.

Peace is simple, and inexpensive relative to the human and economic costs of war.  But war props up power, not only within our borders, but also in the country being targeted.  North Korea builds its dictatorship upon the very real threat of invasion and attack.

Washington Examiner: Every Pentagon wish is granted in Trump’s defense budget request

The Federalist: Why it’s a big problem if the FISA court relied on Steele’s hearsay to grant surveillance order

Alternet: Trump’s budget doubles down on the Drug War

National Review: Duke professor: “Libertarians seem to be on the autism spectrum.”Ed: Bahaha.  It does sound as though she is actually implying that Public Choice Theorist, and academic god among insects, James Buchanan, is on the autism spectrum.  Nothing more than a middle-school slur from someone with no actual arguments. “Oh those people I don’t like? They’re just retarded.”

New York Times: Are spies like us? A national security reporter says yes, and no

ACLU: A California city fights off ICE’s digital deportation machine

The Intercept: Republican scaremongering on “Sanctuary Cities” backfires, Democrats win big upset in Florida special election

Valley News: Facebook loses Germany court battle over privacy settings

The Week: Is America the main obstacle to peace in Korea?

Techdirt: More than 4,000 government websites infected with covert cryptocurrency miner

Business Insider: US intelligence officials say they wouldn’t use a Chinese-made phone for fear of spying. Ed: They speak from the experience of what they themselves do.  Safe to assume US-made phones are little more than our own personal self-surveillance devices.

National Interest: The Deep State is very real

Forbes: Try exercising this Constitutional right and you’re apt to regret it

The Guardian: Social media spying is turning us into a stalking society

TechCrunch: UK unveils extremism-blocking tool and could force tech firms to use it

Antiwar.com: The UK’s hidden role in Julian Assange’s detention

Bloomberg: US airstrikes in Syria killed over 200 Russian contract soldiers, sources say

McClatchyDC: Report: patient advocacy groups pushed opioids after getting industry money

The Intercept: GOP law enforcement chiefs invited donors to help set policy via secret bulletin board

WND: The top 10 colleges that are the worst for free speech

Slate: The arming and disarming of black America

FEE: The most basic freedom is the freedom to quit: “If we move our minds out of the quagmire of competition (indeed, we can’t win tennis matches by quitting) and think of life’s broader goals — the goals of surviving, avoiding injury, finding happiness, and living in accordance with our personal values among people whom we respect and who respect us — then we see that freedom to quit is essential to all of these goals. I am talking here about the freedom to walk away from people and situations that are harmful to our well being.”

The American Conservative: Inside the chilling world of artificially intelligent drones

USA Today: Pentagon risk getting “fatter, not stronger” with spending increases in new budget

Techdirt: Your ‘smart’ TV remains a privacy and security dumpster fire: Consumer Reports

The Guardian: Encryption keeps us safe. It must not be compromised with ‘backdoors’

WND: Who’s the bigger threat to privacy, the NSA or Google?

Activist Post: German court rules Facebook violates users rights with illegal default privacy settings

RON PAUL: E-Verify threatens us all

Reason: West Virginia cop fired for not shooting suicidal man settles lawsuit against city

MintPressNews: Lifting of US propaganda ban gives new meaning to old song

High Times: Is it possible to trick a drug-sniffing dog?