Long quote from Chapter 1 of his book, The War of Art: 

“There’s a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don’t, and the secret is this: It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write. What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance.

Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.

Have you ever brought home a treadmill and let it gather dust in the attic? Ever quit a diet, a course of yoga, a meditation practice? Have you ever bailed out on a call to embark upon a spiritual practice, dedicate yourself to a humanitarian calling, commit your life to the service of others? Have you ever wanted to be a mother, a doctor, an advocate for the weak and helpless; to run for office, crusade for the planet, campaign for world peace, or to preserve the environment? Late at night have you experienced a vision of the person you might become, the work you could accomplish, the realized being you were meant to be? Are you a writer who doesn’t write, a painter who doesn’t paint, an entrepreneur who never starts a venture? Then you know what Resistance is.

Resistance is the most toxic force on the planet. It is the root of more unhappiness than poverty, disease, and erectile dysfunction. To yield to Resistance deforms our spirit. It stunts us and makes us less than we are and were born to be. If you believe in God (and I do) you must declare Resistance evil, for it prevents us from achieving the life God intended when He endowed each of us with our own unique genius. Genius is a Latin word; the Romans used it to denote an inner spirit, holy and inviolable, which watches over us, guiding us to our calling. A writer writes with his genius; an artist paints with hers; everyone who creates operates from this sacramental center. It is our soul’s seat, the vessel that holds our being-in-potential, our star’s beacon and Polaris.

Every sun casts a shadow, and genius’s shadow is Resistance. As powerful as is our soul’s call to realization, so potent are the forces of Resistance arrayed against it. Resistance is faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, harder to kick than crack cocaine. We’re not alone if we’ve been mowed down by Resistance; millions of good men and women have bitten the dust before us.”

Defense One: The Border Patrol’s ‘Constitution-Free Zone’ is probably bigger than you think

The Verge: Ecuador reportedly spent $5 million protecting–and spying on–Julian Assange

EFF: The Supreme Court says your expectation of privacy probably shouldn’t depend on the fine print

The Nation: The CIA didn’t just torture. It experimented on human beings.

The Intercept: Ahead of vote on Gina Haspel, Senate pulls access to damning classified memo

Techdirt: Bill introduced to prevent government agencies from demanding encryption backdoors

Ars Technica: Ex-CIA employee identified but not charged in Vault 7 leak of hacking tools

Washington Post: Nothing says ‘peace’ like 58 dead Palestinians

Antiwar.com: US blocks UN probe into Gaza deaths

Activist Post: If any other country was shooting civilians like Israel, the US would be calling for invasion by now

New York Times: The legacy of stop-and-frisk in New York’s marijuana arrests

The Atlantic: Big Pharma gets a big win from Trump

FEE: Why words like ‘racist’ and ‘fascist’ are losing their power, and why that’s a bad thing

The Atlantic: A new theory linking sleep and creativity Ed: As someone afflicted with an extreme form of sleepwalking, I find all research on sleep fascinating.

Quanta: A new world’s extraordinary orbit points to planet nine

High Times: New study finds alcohol, tobacco the most lethal substances worldwide

Business Insider: A best-selling author tried LSD, magic mushrooms, and DMT, and wrote about all 3 experiences

From Chapter 2 of The Constitution of Liberty: 

“The rationalist who desires to subject everything to human reason is thus faced with a real dilemma. The use of reason aims at control and predictability. But the process of the advance of reason rests on freedom and the unpredictability of human action. Those who extol the powers of human reason usually see only one side of that interaction of human thought and conduct in which reason is at the same time used and shaped. They do not see that, for advance to take place, the social process from which the growth of reason emerges must remain free from its control.

There can be little doubt that man owes some of his greatest successes in the past to the fact that he has not been able to control social life. His continued advance may well depend on his deliberately refraining from exercising controls which are now in his power. In the past, the spontaneous forces of growth, however much restricted, could usually still assert themselves against the organized coercion of the state. With the technological means of control now at the disposal of government, it is not certain that such assertion is still possible; at any rate, it may soon become impossible. We are not far from the point where the deliberately organized forces of society may destroy those spontaneous forces which have made advance possible.”

Slate: How cities are reining in out-of-control policing tech

TechSpot: Google employees are reportedly quitting over Pentagon drone partnership

Bloomberg: Facebook faulted by judge for “troubling theme” in privacy case

GovTech: Crowdsourcing surveillance? Newark, New Jersey’s new policing program raises concerns

Quartz: An Australian regulator is investigating whether Google is spying on the country’s Android users

Boing Boing: London cops are using an unregulated, 98% inaccurate facial recognition tech

EFF: Victory in Alasaad for our digital privacy at the border

CNN: Supreme Court upholds privacy rights for unauthorized rental car drivers in search and seizure case

ACLU: Hollywood offers ominous visions of facial recognition’s future

Washington Post: Illinois police: Keep pot illegal or we’ll kill our dogs

Truthdig: The Pentagon can’t account for $21 trillion (That’s not a typo)

McClatchyDC: Judge wants to know who’s spying on Guantanamo defense attorneys

DAVID FRENCH: Of course America’s too big to govern

JUSTIN RAIMONDO: Kim Jong Un: The commie who came in from the cold

The American Conservative: Was there ever even an Iranian nuclear program?

New York Times: Surest way to face marijuana charges in New York: be black or Hispanic

OC Register: Training kills more troops than war. What can be done?

High Times: British medical journal advocates for decriminalizing all drugs

OregonLive: First, marijuana. Are magic mushrooms next?

Gizmodo: Thousands of gamers help to prove Einstein wrong

Despite despising the unfettered market economy, he nevertheless developed revolutionary theories on radical uncertainty, ideas that greatly affected writers like G.L.S. Shackle, Ludwig Lachmann, and much later, Nassim Taleb, who then took his ideas farther than he ever could. This is from his General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money:

“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”

A flurry of good pieces from The Intercept:

• Business is booming for U.K.’s spy tech industry
• Experts say keep Amazon’s Alexa away from your kids
• U.S. moves forward with multibillion-dollar “smart bomb” sale to Saudi Arabia and UAE despite Yemen civilian deaths

New York Times: Silicon Valley faces regulatory fight on its own turf

Seattle Times: ‘Smart’ meters in Washington state: convenience or potential invasion of privacy?

Nextgov: Boston Dynamics is going to start selling its creepy robots in 2019

Reason: In the U.S., there are 219,000 women behind bars

Washington Post: Parkland school officials refuse to release surveillance footage, continue lying to parents

The American Conservative: D.C. couldn’t beat Syria’s Assad, so it will punish his people

National Review: A powerful legal group changes the law while nobody’s looking

Cato: Immigrants consume less welfare than native-born Americans: Study

STEVE HORWITZ: The grocery store as an indicator of American progress 

Big Think: Silicon Valley’s long obsession with LSD

VICE: What it’s like to take ayahuasca at a psychedelic healing retreat

Foreign Policy: Inside the cutthroat world of billion-dollar military supply contracts

Boing Boing: Cops have a secret, unaccountable system for tracking you buy your cell phone, and they abuse it like crazy

Fortune: Facebook, Uber, and the trouble with ‘God View’

Engadget: Lawmakers want to know how Amazon protects Echo Dot’s child users

The Intercept: Oliver North worked with cocaine traffickers to arm terrorists. Now he’ll be president of the NRA. Ed: I’ve never had a good feeling about the NRA, mainly due to the bleeding over of its politics into authoritarian positions on matters like the war on drugs, the war on terrorism, religion, blind cop worship, blind military worship, etc.  Gun Owners of America is a far better organization.

WSWS: Ecuador hints it may hand over Julian Assange to Britain and the US

Forbes: Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth is up $13 billion since privacy scandal

Cato: Protectionism and trade barriers aren’t just bad economics, they’re also immoral

The Guardian: Scientists to grow ‘mini-brains’ using Neanderthal DNA

ACLU: For the second time in 2 days, federal court upholds privacy rights at the border

Techdirt: FBI agents can be held accountable for tossing immigrants on the no-fly list for refusing to be informants

Activist Post: Federal appeals court in Virginia rules Feds cannot search electronic devices without a warrant

Gizmodo: A telecom loophole lets this shady company give anyone’s location to the cops

JUSTIN RAIMONDO: Iran deal exit: America First, or Israel First?

Ars Technica: AI trained to navigate develops brain-like location tracking

Mises: The utter failure of America’s system of Indian reservations

Eric Peters is an amazing writer. He reviews cars and offers up his opinion on the auto industry from a libertarian perspective. He’s like the Mencken of car criticism, and in a recent article he unmasks Elon Musk as just another crony addicted to handouts, and riding the electric car hype train:

“When financial analyst Toni Sacconaghi of Sanford C. Bernstein asked Tesla CEO Elon Musk about the money-losing electric car company’s capital requirements going forward (Tesla has burned through – cue Dr. Evil – one billion dollars in three of the last four quarters) Musk replied: “Boring, bonehead questions are not cool. Next?””

…”Neither man gives a damn about the damage – human or financial – imposed on others. Nor that others are made to pay for it all. They don’t even give lip service to pretending  anything they do bothers them in the least. All that matters is the Great Dream – whether it’s “regime change” in some resource-rich country which hasn’t attacked us (a war crime, once upon a time) or this equally demented business of manufacturing electric cars that almost no one would freely buy absent the subsidies and mandates.”

And this nugget: “Another analyst, Joe Spak of RBC Capital Markets, had the audacity to ask Elon a question relating to the true cost of the Model 3 – production of which is also nothing close to what Elon promised, but never mind that.

“Boring. Next,” came the reply.

With good reason. Move way from that one as quickly as possible.”

Here’s some headlines to consider:

Elon Musk’s growing empire is fueled by$4.9 billion in government in government subsidies

If Tesla is worth more than GM, why are taxpayers still subsidizing it?

It looks like the state of California is bailing out Tesla

Musk is nothing more than another crony at the public trough, just one that’s unusually good at publicity stunts.

And who knows, maybe in the near future we’ll see Tesla tanks equipped with Google AI driving through Third World villages and mowing down the inhabitants.

What a grim irony it is to see Google, the company that claimed ‘Don’t be evil‘ as its official motto and code of conduct, only to jump swiftly at the opportunity to equip the Pentagon’s combat drones with it’s DeepMind artificial intelligence.  These are the same drones that murder far more innocent civilians than “militants”, whatever the hell that means, and are running wild all over the Third World.  To their credit, over 3,000 Google employees, citing the ‘Don’t be evil’ motto, demanded that their employer end contract work with the Pentagon.

Google, in effect, has become just the latest cog in the military-industrial complex churning out machines of war to be deployed in the various endless wars that our government is currently engaged in.  One can imagine Google drones flying over Syria soon, and even Iran.

I believe that almost everyone, and every company has a price, but at least drop the sanctimony. Evil is in the eye of the beholder, and when the price is right, that term can become almost infinitely elastic.  It can even be twisted to mean its opposite.

What we have to fear most are people with tremendous power over our lives and who also believe they have the ability to distinguish between good and evil.

I was reminded of Google’s ridiculous motto while watching the eighth episode of season 3 of the tragically cancelled greatest show on television, Ash vs. the Evil Dead. Shotgun-and-chainsaw wielding slacker Ash Williams, upon seeing his teenage daughter’s fear and hopelessness as they are being dragged to Hell inside his Delta 88, reminds her, “Evil is not the boss of us!”, before gunning the car up out of the reach of the Deadites, plowing over the Grim Reaper himself, and reaching safety. Again, a tragedy that the show was cancelled.

“Don’t be evil” is only sincere when citizens use it to chide their own government and the architects of the Surveillance State that are in the Pentagon’s pocket. Government is the entity that is supposed to be residing in a Constitutionally-erected prison, because, if not, they will build one around us, and use power-and-money hungry dipshits in companies like Google to accomplish it.