From H.L. Mencken’s essay, The Politician:

“AFTER damning politicians up hill and down dale for many years, as rogues and vagabonds, frauds and scoundrels, I sometimes suspect that, like everyone else, I often expect too much of them. Though faith and confidence are surely more or less foreign to my nature, I not infrequently find myself looking to them to be able, diligent, candid, and even honest. Plainly enough, that is too large an order, as anyone must realize who reflects upon the manner in which they reach public office. They seldom if ever get there by merit alone, at least in democratic states. Sometimes, to be sure, it happens, but only by a kind of miracle. They are chosen normally for quite different reasons, the chief of which is simply their power to impress and enchant the intellectually underprivileged. It is a talent like any other, and when it is exercised by a radio crooner, a movie actor or a bishop, it even takes on a certain austere and sorry respectability. But it is obviously not identical with a capacity for the intricate problems of statecraft.

Those problems demand for their solution—when they are soluble at all, which is not often—a high degree of technical proficiency, and with it there should go an adamantine kind of integrity, for the temptations of a public official are almost as cruel as those of a glamor girl or a dipsomaniac. But we train a man for facing them, not by locking him up in a monastery and stuffing him with wisdom and virtue, but by turning him loose on the stump. If he is a smart and enterprising fellow, which he usually is, he quickly discovers there that hooey pleases the boobs a great deal more than sense. Indeed, he finds that sense really disquiets and alarms them—that it makes them, at best, intolerably uncomfortable, just as a tight collar makes them uncomfortable, or a speck of dust in the eye, or the thought of Hell. The truth, to the overwhelming majority of mankind, is indistinguishable from a headache. After trying a few shots of it on his customers, the larval statesman concludes sadly that it must hurt them, and after that he taps a more humane keg, and in a little while the whole audience is singing “Glory, glory, hallelujah,” and when the returns come in the candidate is on his way to the White House.”

With all the talk recently of greater restrictions on gun ownership and even repeal of the Second Amendment, a point must be made that is not made often enough.  It is that our rights as citizens provide a far greater defense against injustice for minorities than the majority.  The majority by definition hold the reins of power.  They vote their people into office, they get their bills and regulations passed.  They control the government at every level, for the most part.  The majority therefore has no real use of a Bill of Rights.  But while those rights exist for the benefit of all, minorities, either in skin color, language, political opinion, or what have you, are the primary beneficiaries of inalienable rights.  They are effectively a shield against the tyranny of the majority, be the First, Second, Fourth, or the rest.  A majority of people who hold the same opinion of government have no need of First Amendment protections, only the minority viewpoints and ideas require such protection. Which is why I find a dissonance among those who ostensibly champion the causes of minorities in this country.  Because they are the very people clamoring most loudly for a repeal of the right to gun ownership, deriding “gun culture”, and waging a veritable war against one of the rights most crucial for the protection of the most vulnerable minorities in this country. Minorities, whether sexual, racial,  ideological, face disproportionate ostracism and violence on the part of the majority.  They therefore must have their right of self-defense held inviolable against the continuous attacks on it.  Minorities of all stripes must, therefore, be on guard against those who profess to speak for them.

NY Daily News: Court allows NYPD to hide records of Muslim surveillance

The Verge: All non-citizens will have to disclose social media accounts at U.S. border

Motherboard: The FBI used classified hacking tools in ordinary criminal investigations

Washington Examiner: Judge ridicules suggestion that ‘Deep State’ made him dismiss NSA lawsuits

The Intercept: “We know where your kids live”: How John Bolton once threatened an international official

The American Conservative: The anti-liberty boomerang of U.S. militarism

MintPressNews: Ecuador cuts off Julian Assange’s internet over social media posts

Mises: Secession is going mainstream

Reason: Keep testing self-driving cars, even if they kill people

Futurism: Scientists found a galaxy with almost no dark matter. Here’s what that means.

From Albert Jay Nock:

“I once voted at a Presidential election. There being no real issue at stake, and neither candidate commanding any respect whatever, I cast my vote for Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi. I knew Jeff was dead, but I voted on Artemus Ward’s principle that if we can’t have a live man who amounts to anything, by all means let’s have a first-class corpse. I still think that vote was as effective as any of the millions that have been cast since then.”

And on a more serious note:

“Even a successful revolution, even if such a thing were conceivable, against the military tyranny which is Statism’s last expedient, would accomplish nothing. The people would be as thoroughly indoctrinated with Statism after the revolution as they were before, and therefore the revolution would be no revolution, but a coup d’Etat, by which the citizen would gain nothing but a mere change of oppressors. There have been many revolutions in the last twenty-five years, and thus has been the sum of their history. They amount to no more than an impressive testimony to the great truth that there can be no right action except there be right thinking behind it.As long as the easy, attractive, superficial philosophy of Statism remains in control of the citizen’s mind, no beneficent social change can be affected, whether by revolution or by any other means.”

Motherboard: Apple’s position on privacy is paying off: “Apple has its own host of issues—labor practices up and down its supply chain, walled gardens, the environmental toll of creating highly intricate devices that are difficult to repair and impossible to upgrade. But Apple’s fundamental business model does not focus on turning its customers into sellable datasets. While Apple has had every opportunity to turn its devices and services into data collection opportunities, it has instead largely focused on a straightforward business model of selling and facilitating the sale of goods, services, and software.

Apple’s focus on protecting its customers’ privacy has given it the moral high ground—both when the FBI asked the company to hack into an iPhone, and now, when it seems Silicon Valley is going to drown with the constant drip-drip-drip of new privacy abuses becoming widely known.”

The Intercept: Department of Justice charges FBI whistleblower under Espionage Act

Washington Times: IG will probe FBI abuses of FISA after Trump campaign surveillance

Activist Post: Five thousand inventions in limbo under “secrecy orders” at the U.S. patent office

EFF: Thinking about what you need in a secure messenger

JOHN WHITEHEAD: If you really want to save lives, take aim at government violence

FEE: Administrative law is the real “Deep State”: “What’s the greatest threat to liberty in America? …the enormous rogue beast known as the administrative state. Sometimes called the regulatory state or the deep state, it is a government within the government… Unelected bureaucrats not only write their own laws, they also interpret these laws and enforce them in their own courts with their own judges. All this is in blatant violation of the Constitution… Mr. Hamburger, 60, a constitutional scholar…says, sitting in his office at Columbia Law School… “The government can choose to…use an administrative proceeding where you don’t have the right to be heard by a real judge or a jury and you don’t have the full due process of law…” In volume and complexity, the edicts from federal agencies exceed the laws passed by Congress by orders of magnitude. “The administrative state has become the government’s predominant mode of contact with citizens,” Mr. Hamburger says. …“The framers of the Constitution were very clear about this,” Mr. Hamburger says…”Congress cannot delegate the legislative powers to an agency, just as judges cannot delegate their power to an agency.””

Mises: How the White House hijacked the ability to declare war

RealClearScience: Meet your interstitium, a newfound ‘organ’

Motherboard: China is using its facial recognition tech to send jaywalkers fines through text messages

The Guardian: Beware the smart toaster: 18 tips for surviving the surveillance age

NPR: A needle in a legal haystack could sink a major Supreme Court privacy case

Forbes: Can government force you to speak contrary to your beliefs?

Reason: Gerrymandering is out of control

High Times: Marijuana arrests plummet in New Orleans after policy change

Mises: The difference between good globalism and bad globalism

Gizmodo: Could Higgs Boson and primordial black holes explain dark matter?

Here is the most fundamental, most important argument in favor of liberty that I’ve ever come across, taken from Chapter 2 of my glorious copy of Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty: The Definitive Edition (bold text highlighted by me):

“Man learns by the disappointment of expectations. Needless to say, we ought not to increase the unpredictability of events by foolish human institutions. So far as possible, our aim should be to improve human institutions so as to increase the chances of correct foresight. Above all, however, we should provide the maximum of opportunity for unknown individuals to learn of facts that we ourselves are yet unaware of and to make use of this knowledge in their actions. It is through the mutually adjusted efforts of many people that more knowledge is utilized than any one individual possesses or than it is possible to synthesize intellectually; and it is through such utilization of dispersed knowledge that achievements are made possible greater than any single mind can foresee. It is because freedom means the renunciation of direct control of individual efforts that a free society can make use of so much more knowledge than the mind of the wisest ruler could comprehend.

From this foundation of the argument for liberty it follows that we shall not achieve its ends if we confine liberty to the particular instances where we know it will do good. Freedom granted only when it is known beforehand that its effects will be beneficial is not freedom. If we knew how freedom would be used, the case for it would largely disappear. We shall never get the benefits of freedom, never obtain those unforeseeable new developments for which it provides the opportunity, if it is not also granted where the uses made of it by some do not seem desirable. It is therefore no argument against individual freedom that it is frequently abused. Freedom necessarily means that many things will be done which we do not like. Our faith in freedom does not rest on the foreseeable results in particular circumstances but on the belief that it will, on balance, release more forces for the good than for the bad.

It also follows that the importance of our being free to do a particular thing has nothing to do with the question of whether we or the majority are ever likely to make use of that particular possibility. To grant no more freedom than all can exercise would be to misconceive its function completely. The freedom that will be used by only one man in a million may be more important to society and more beneficial to the majority than any freedom that we all use.

It might even be said that the less likely the opportunity to make use of freedom to do a particular thing, the more precious it will be for society as a whole. The less likely the opportunity, the more serious will it be to miss it when it arises, for the experience that it offers will be nearly unique. It is also probably true that the majority are not directly interested in most of the important things that any one person done by the individuals. But majority action is, of necessity, confined to the already tried and ascertained, to issues on which agreement has already been reached in that process of discussion that must be preceded by different experiences and actions on the part of different individuals.

The benefits I derive from freedom are thus largely the result of the uses of freedom by others, and mostly of those uses of freedom that I could never avail myself of. It is therefore not necessarily freedom that I can exercise myself that is most important for me. It is certainly more important that anything can be tried by somebody than that all can do the same things. It is not because we like to be able to do particular things, not because we regard any particular freedom as essential to our happiness, that we have a claim to freedom. The instinct that makes us revolt against any physical restraint, though a helpful ally, is not always a safe guide for justifying or delimiting freedom. What is important is not what freedom I personally would like to exercise but what freedom some person may need in order to do things beneficial to society. This freedom we can assure to the unknown person only by giving it to all.

The benefits of freedom are therefore not confined to the free—or, at least, a man does not benefit mainly from those aspects of freedom which he himself takes advantage of freedom of some therefore applies to the freedom of all. But it is still better for all that some should be free than none and also that many enjoy full freedom than that all have a restricted freedom. The significant point is that the importance of freedom to do a particular thing has nothing to do with the number of people who want to do it: it might almost be in inverse proportion. One consequence of this is that a society may be hamstrung by controls, although the great majority may not be aware that their freedom has been significantly curtailed. If we proceeded on the assumption that only the exercises of freedom that the majority will practice are important, we would be certain to create a stagnant society with all the characteristics of unfreedom.”

That the true benefit of a free society stems from the uses of liberty by other, unknown people, is the most fundamental argument in favor of liberty for all. Internalizing this small block of text from Hayek is worth far more to understanding the importance of a free society than years’ worth of slogging through treatises and dissertations.

Motherboard: What are ‘Data Brokers’ and why are they scooping up information about you?

Stars and Stripes: FBI could have tried harder to hack into iPhone before launching 2015 court battle, watchdog says

Zero Hedge: Austin bomber’s capture exposes depth of U.S. Surveillance State

Washington Post: China’s new surveillance state puts Facebook’s privacy problems in the shade

Boing Boing: Invisible, targeted, infrared light can fool facial recognition software into thinking anyone is anyone else

Reason: Dentist threatens to report parents for neglect unless they bring in their kids (and wallets)

HowToGeek: Facebook’s settings include privacy buttons that do absolutely nothing

Truthdig: Prosecutorial misconduct reaches epidemic proportions

The Hill: Opioid epidemic has cost U.S. roughly 1 million workers, $702 billion: study

Grateful Web: 75th anniversary of Bicycle Day

National Review: Where are the Left’s modern muckrakers? “In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there was an epic fight of so-called muckrakers — journalists and novelists such as Frank Norris, Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens, and Ida Tarbell, along with trust-busting politicians like Teddy Roosevelt — against rail, steel, and oil monopolies. Whatever one thought of their sensationalism and often hard-left socialist agendas, they at least brought public attention to price fixing, product liabilities, monopolies, and the buying of politicians.

No such progressive zealotry exists today in Silicon Valley and its affiliated tech spin-offs. And the result is a Roman gladiatorial spectacle with no laws in the arena.”

Business Insider: Parts of China using facial recognition tech that can scan the country’s entire population in one second

Spectator: Don’t let Silicon Valley get its FAANGs into Washington

Wired: The dark web’s favorite currency is less untraceable than it seems

The American Conservative: A madman on the National Security Council

The Week: Don’t vilify responsible gun owners. Praise them.

High Times: Research shows CBD may help addicts maintain sobriety

Ars Technica: Uber told to stop testing driverless tech in Arizona

You people are up late. Alright, here’s more, this time from Nock’s essay, Prohibition and Civilization, which must be read in its entirety:

“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.”

There aren’t really any words that come to mind that could add to this perfect, most Nockian effusion.  You read it and can immediately gauge how our own society is being pulled, perversely, toward some Puritanical hell-on-earth.  Not narrowly religious, either, but the crude, mob-like desire to have government impose a certain value system on all of society, to police speech, thought and our private actions, the voyeuristic society that demands the elimination of all privacy, the handing over to government to do all manner of things to us.  Of course, the closer we are pulled toward the Puritan Ideal, the greater the number of society-wide witch hunts become.  Just look at the news.  Outrage is manufactured on an industrial scale, aimed like an ICBM at desired political will o’ wisps, then manipulated into a movement that can be safely funneled to one of the two major political parties. Voters for life.

These “quotes on liberty” posts will be daily now, as an effort on my part to revisit the best articulations of that which we seek to achieve.  “Back to the lab”, or back to first principles, it’s something that too few liberty activists take time to do.  In fact, I’ve noticed a yawning gulf between liberty activists and liberty scholars in the sense that the activists I know of do not read the great works of libertarian scholarship, and the scholars rarely get up and become active in actually working toward the goal of liberty in our lifetime.  A cadre of “scholar activists” would be a powerful force, but it might be a chore to prevent internecine conflicts and factionalizing, which has blighted the libertarian movement for decades.  I still think libertarian activists should read more, and by that I mean actual books.  Pot and kettle, this.