The Hill: California judge rules in favor of baker who refused to make cake for same-sex couple Ed: On the grounds that it is “artistic expression”, although the correct defense would be that doing so would be involuntary labor, or, slavery.  Also, why would this couple want a cake from a shop that had been forced to make it?  I can’t imagine there are no gay-friendly bakers in California.

Oklahoma in the news again: Activist Post: Mother of seven receives court-ordered sterilization in exchange for shorter sentence Ed: Technically, the procedure was voluntary, but really, given a choice, plenty of people would give up a lot more than that to avoid prison time.

National Review: FISA-gate is scarier than Watergate

The Intercept: Trump’s military parade is ridiculous, but he isn’t the first US politician to use Humvees and F-16s as props

MassLive: Pentagon misconduct complaints on the rise, but fewer officers are being found guilty

Techdirt: Judge tells CIA it can’t hand classified info to journalists and pretend the info hasn’t been made public

Mises: The new German gov’t is bad news

Gizmodo: The house that spied on me

High Times: People are celebrating Valentine’s Day with weed-infused chocolate

Reuters: Bat genetic trait holds secret of longevity

Forbes: The biggest myth in quantum physics

And now for the most informative video you’ll watch today:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8z7NC5sgik

It clashes with our indoctrinated view that cops are “our friends”.  No, they aren’t.  Friends are people we know and trust.  Cops are the armed enforcers of the Political Class, but they will pretend to be your friend to gain your trust, in order to milk you for information, or incriminate yourself.

The other greatest libertarian writer of my generation, the late Will Grigg, wrote a wonderful column a year ago on the topic:

Teaching Kids to Trust the Police is Child Abuse.

That indignation you feel at reading that title is the indoctrination resurfacing again.  It’s okay to feel it, but it’s important to recognize it for what it is: conditioning over a period of decades to trust anyone with a badge on.  The ubiquity and effectiveness of that particular mind-laundry is the reason the TSA, a few years ago, began giving their agents uniforms that resembled law enforcement, complete with badge.  Because Americans submit to those with badges.  The flip side of that coin is that the TSA agents began acting more like cops, despite having no law enforcement power.

What an ugly reality, and an unhealthy environment for liberty.

ACLU: Leaked DHS report uses junk science to argue for surveillance of Muslims

EFF: Newly released surveillance orders show that even with individualized court oversight, spying powers are misused

The Federalist: Criminal referral confirms memo’s explosive claims of FISA abuse

Reason: Senate memo on surveillance of Carter Page suggests FBI was misled by Steele

WSWS: Facebook announces latest step in censorship campaign, prioritizing “local news” 

PJmedia: New minimum wage laws will eliminate more than 260,000 jobs in 2018

Reason: Jeff Sessions says opioid addiction starts with marijuana. Here are 6 studies that say otherwise.

Washington Times: Let cryptocurrencies compete with government money

The American Conservative: Trump’s parade and our endless wars

The Week: The sriracha hot sauce creator is an American hero

LA Times: For privacy advocates, Nunes’ criticism of the FBI brings mental whiplash

The Atlantic: The populist Right’s elitist approach to surveillance abuses

ScienceNews: Your phone is like a spy in your pocket

Techdirt: Court shuts down trooper’s attempt to portray new-ish minivans with imperfect drivers as justification for traffic stop

MirrorUK: Chinese police are using high-tech sunglasses that use facial recognition to catch suspects

The Intercept: Blowback: How a CIA-backed coup led to the rise of Iran’s Ayatollahs

Al-Monitor: Military audit confirms US tanks ended up with Iran-backed militias

MintPressNews: UK blocks hacktivist’s extradition over oppressive US prison conditions

Reason: Silk Road’s founder is in jail for life, but the Dark Web only grows

Reason: If a school cop threatens your 13-year old with child porn charges for sexting, get a lawyer Ed: While it’s probably not wise to give kids smartphones, it’s even less wise to place unaccountable, union-shielded, violence-prone bullies in schools.  Better to have trained professionals working with schoolkids rather than someone who couldn’t get a job anywhere else.

FEE: To save rhinos, legalize the horn trade

High Times: California’s history of arresting minorities for marijuana

EFF: Twilio demonstrates why courts should review every National Security Letter

American Thinker: Does James Comey have a perjury problem? 

5NewsOnline: Is Facebook listening in on your conversations?

Business Insider: The NYPD spent decades spying on New Yorkers–now you can see what they collected

Cato: Abuse-deterrent opioids and the law of unintended consequences

High Times: Can cannabis wean addicts off heroin and other opiates?

Reason: It’s not enough to get paid for not working, these L.A. police and firefighters figured out how to double it

Activist Post: Law enforcement can use smart meter parking apps to spy on everyone

WhoWhatWhy: What five ‘domestic terrorism’ cases tell us about FBI tactics

Popular Mechanics: Alaska’s melting permafrost is filled with mercury

SingularityHub: ‘Cosmic GPS’ tech will help us explore the furthest reaches of space

With Ford’s patent filed on autonomous, AI-powered police cruisers, some apparently believe the future looks brighter for bias-free policing.  The logic goes that, since it’s a robot doing the police work, race and class won’t factor into who gets punished.  But it doesn’t take too much of a stretch to see the inevitable future of autonomous cop cars cruising around neighborhoods.  For one, the vehicle would most certainly be equipped with advanced facial recognition tech, and instantaneous access to a biometric database that it would also feed information into.  Second, these drone vehicles wouldn’t replace cops at all, but merely be used as another weapon by them against us.  In essence, each community would be given it’s own personal Surveillance State avatar, an automated, AI-powered snitch snooping around neighborhoods, gulping up images of people, their activities, etc.

Like I’ve said before, not just the protection of our liberty, but our continued existence as a species depends on the preservation of a sphere of privacy from our own government.  The unrelenting push towards total surveillance is a push toward a point when we no longer have that ability.

New York Times: NYT asks court to unseal documents on surveillance of Carter Page

Reason: Trump defenders should support the NYT effort to unseal secret surveillance documents

Alternet: The FBI targeted the Left with devious tactics for years–now they’re finally receiving the same treatment in return

The Federalist: How senior-level corruption can affect entire agencies like the FBI

Also The Federalist: If you love law enforcement, you must criticize FBI corruption

Here comes the perversion of bodycams: SCMP: Chinese police testing panoramic-view body cameras with inbuilt facial recognition

The Intercept: Iranian-American refused to spy for the FBI and wound up with a prison sentence

The Guardian: EU data protection law may end up protecting scammers, experts warn

CNBC: Bitcoin plunges below $6,000

FEE: The solar panel tariff threatens far more American jobs than it protects

Aeon: “Entangled time” is mind-boggling

CNBC: Audit finds Pentagon lost track of $800 million in projects

The Hill: Will FISA secrecy doom democracy?

Reason: Governments hate bitcoin and cash for the same reason: They protect people’s privacy.

Al Jazeera: Is Mexico the most dangerous country on Earth?

FFF: America: A military nation

MintPressNews: Cops rebranded as “school resource officers” can injure and ciminalize schoolkids

CNNMoney: Fasten your seatbelt, Dow futures tumble over 400 points

High Times: Girl Scout sells over 300 boxes of cookies outside marijuana dispensary

There was a period of time when I felt compelled to consume every idea, every piece of music, art, literature, and poetry possible.  This led me down many paths, which all seemed to converge on my finding the philosophy of liberty.  My massive, strange book collection is a testament to that time of my life, and the knowledge gained pops up in convenient places when I need context for a current event.  I came across Romantic-era poet William Blake as a teenager, but read him more deeply in my early twenties, specifically his book The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.  There’s something hypnotic about his use of language, but the dualism between what Blake saw as two types of people: the energetic creators and rational organizers stuck with me.  I won’t go any further into this aspect at the moment.  What’s significant to me about Blake’s book is this passage:

“As I was walking among the fires of hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius; which to Angels look like torment and insanity, I collected some of their Proverbs; thinking that as the sayings used in a nation, mark its character, so the Proverbs of Hell, shew the nature in Infernal wisdom better than any description of buildings or garments,

When I came home: on the abyss of the five senses, where a flat sided steep frowns over the present world, I saw a mighty Devil folded in black clouds, hovering on the sides of the rock, with cor

roding fires he wrote the following sentence now percieved by the minds of men, & read by them on earth.

How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way,

Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?”

Most people, especially a particularly pretentious type who’ve probably never actually read Blake, know the poet from this quote:

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”

Both passages are from the same book, but the second is the source from which Aldous Huxley took the title for the published account of his experiment with the psychedelic alkaloid, mescaline, The Doors of Perception. And of course The Doors took their name from Huxley’s book.  Huxley reported an immersive spiritual experience while under the influence and felt that there are regions of the mind that could probably only be accessed with the help of psychedelics.

Now, mescaline is the active chemical in peyote, a substance found in a small cactus, and used by Native North Americans for over 5,000 years in spiritual rituals.  Most observations from those who have had experience with the psychedelic concur that it induces a spiritual, or transcendent state of mind unlike anything they’ve experienced before.

This is similar to experiences with other psychedelics, such as magic mushrooms, DMT, ketamine, ecstasy, and LSD.  These compounds have been found to have almost no risk of use, particularly mescaline, psilocybin or ‘psychedelic mushrooms’, and MDMA/ecstasy, and DMT.  There is also incontrovertible proof that these compounds effectively treat depression, post-traumatic stress syndrome, and a wide variety of mental disorders.  And yet they remain illegal.  I should note that the world is slowly waking up to their potential.  In their place, however, are pharmaceutical monstrosities that are ubiquitously prescribed despite their known, devastating, side effects, and low effectiveness.

I’m of the opinion that if psychedelics were to become ‘mainstream’, where every adult had quick access to these substances, the world experience an unheard-of medical revolution.  The pharmaceutical industry would collapse, having been built upon patented petri dish poisons, and truly healing medicine would be available at almost no cost to everyone.  

This also brings me back to Blake’s dualism.  The future of the human race depends on rare, creative individuals who theorize, create, and invent, whose originality solves the problems of the world.  I believe that many of these people need psychedelics to aid the creative process.  I also believe that the lack of access to these substances is why we see so many creative individuals turn to alcohol or other dangerous substances and lifestyles. Their mind is craving something that they can’t yet provide.  

We now see Silicon Valley entrepreneurs experiment with LSD ‘micro-dosing’ to enhance creativity.

It’s also now reported that the ingestion of psychedelic mushrooms can lead to anti-authoritarian behavior.

I believe this kind of experimentation with psychedelics should be available to everyone, not only because of the priceless medicinal value, but because our future as a species probably depends on allowing the ‘energetic creators’ the freedom to experiment with these substances.

Please send your random responses to my random posts to digitalsunset86@gmail.com

Washington Examiner: California overreacts and presumes every homeschooling parent is a child abuser

Consortium News: ‘Deep State’ veterans find new homes in mainstream media

The Week: China’s Black Mirror moment Ed: The Chinese gov’t will start giving their citizens a “social credit” score, which measures each Chinese citizen’s “trustworthiness”.  Disturbing because this is our future as well.

Washington Post: Hawaii false missile threat: Fired worker says he feels bad but is not at fault

FEE: Imagine being locked up in prison because of bad forensics

BankInfoSecurity: Fitness Dystopia in the Age of Self-Surveillance

High Times: This Congressman could be sabotaging legal cannabis

Al Jazeera: Saudi-led coalition killed 68 children in Yemen: UN. Ed: Let us never again believe the ‘preemptive war for humanitarian reasons’ lie.  The destruction of Yemen and its population by the US-armed Saudi military should never be forgotten, as this is clearly one of the greatest war crimes ever committed by our own government.  That only independent news is discussing this at any length is a mind-boggling scandal.

ACLU: Congress needs to hold ICE accountable for abuses

Reason: The pernicious myth of “Chain Migration” Ed: The illegal immigrant scare has been more psychological propaganda used to construct a proto-totalitarian Surveillance State along the US border.  It’s no exaggeration at all to say that the security of our rights and privacy along the border is a good indicator for the security of our rights and privacy will be in the rest of the country within the next two decades.  In the same way that foreign theaters of war are zones where the Pentagon can test all manner of new weapons and tech, the US border provides a testing arena for total surveillance.  It also provides feedback for the ‘tyranny threshold’ that Americans currently are conditioned to accept.  Chances are, if Americans are accepting subhuman treatment at the border, they’ll accept it everywhere else, too.

Newsweek: China building AI-powered nuclear submarine that ‘could have its own thoughts’

CNBC: Over $60 billion wiped off value of cryptocurrencies as bitcoin drops below $8,000

Futurism: Florida man becomes first person to live with advanced mind-controlled robotic arm