Gizmodo: The NSA managed to collect 500 million US call records in 2017 despite targeting just 40 people

The Intercept: How Scott Pruitt helped Arkansas poultry giants pollute one of Oklahoma’s prettiest rivers

Ars Technica: Body-cam giant snaps up biggest rival to create near-monopoly

Reason: Conservatives need to put aside kneejerk police support

And another one: The Federalist: The real villain in Avengers: Infinity War is overpopulation panic

Wired UK: Facial recognition tech used by UK police is making a ton of mistakes

New York Times: Why are US troops in the Yemen war?

Motherboard: Idaho State University lost enough weapons-grade plutonium to make a dirty bomb

Forbes: Dyson spheres are missing from the galaxy

Vox: The Golden State Killer case shows how swiftly we’re losing genetic privacy

ZDnet: Tech giants hit by NSA spying slam encryption backdoors

Gizmodo: Chicago advances bill allowing police drones to surveil protestors

DW: Whistleblower Chelsea Manning in Berlin warns over Google, Facebook privacy

Techdirt: Virginia Supreme Court says license plate readers collect personal data; suggests use violates state law

Washington Examiner: Alan Dershowitz: Michael Cohen wiretap shows the US is becoming a surveillance state

The Federalist: Google’s insane campus is what happens when you politicize everything

Reason: Maine legislators override governor’s veto of marijuana legalization

FFF: The Bundy Ranch case explains Westerner’s distrust of Washington

Of course he does: NDTV: Bill Gates praises Aadhaar, says “it doesn’t pose any privacy issue” Ed: Gotta love that predictable elitist condescension in their “I know what’s best for the Third World” attitude. It shapes every aspect of his vanity-flattering, “humanitarian” efforts in countries that do not want nor need it.  What the Third World needs most is protection from these First World humanitarians.

Interestingly, it’s the elites that buy into the overpopulation myth, and there have been quite a few well-written pieces coming out in recent days as it becomes obvious that the Avenger’s Thanos is motivated by the fear of overpopulation.  Here is one such piece from National Review: Infinity War: Thanos plans to cull humans, echoing Paul and Anne Erlich

Wall Street Journal: The new science of psychedelics

Nature: The ethics of experimenting with human brain tissue Ed: Could we soon create a brain in a vat that contemplates whether it’s a brain in a vat?

What I recently watched unfold before my eyes at the movie theater had a bizarre synchronicity, considering how much thought I’d given the topic lately: the overpopulation myth taken to its inevitable conclusion.  Thanos, the villian of the latest Avengers film, is a dupe, religiously devoted to the idea that the universe itself is overpopulated, and must be cut in half via genocide on a mind-boggling scale.  That may or may not be a spoiler.  Stranger still, it seems almost as if Thanos has been given this justification for total evil as a way to make him a sympathetic character.  A more human touch, since he’s doing this for the good of the universe. His overpopulation thesis, when he tells it, is an overt cue for the audience to slowly nod their heads in reluctant agreement that yes, resources are finite, and, to his eyes, populations are exploding at an unsustainable rate. Therefore, he must step in and do the hard but necessary thing of murdering half the universe.  Thanos doesn’t appear to have ever heard of the Simon/Erlich wager, comparative advantage, or economics at all.  Which also props up my theory that the overpopulation argument is an appeal to the “man-in-the-street”, in that, on the surface, it appears imminently reasonable, in exactly the same way that trade protectionism, socialism, and nationalism appear very reasonable.

Thanos is what you get when you convince enough people that “overpopulation”, whatever that means, is a problem that must be remedied.

More on this tomorrow.

Gizmodo: Oakland passes nation’s strongest surveillance technology ordinance yet

The Intercept: New bipartisan bill could give President the power to imprison US citizens in military detention forever

Activist Post: James Comey says Deep State doesn’t exist, then describes the Deep State’s existence

LA Times: Technology turns our cities into spies for ICE, whether we like it or not

Reason: New York officials weaponize regulatory power against the NRA

The Hill: TSA forced to check whether air marshals show up to work sober: report

Techdirt: Amazon joins Google in making censorship easy, threatens signal for circumventing censorship regimes

FEE: Bigotry and compulsory inclusion are both collectivist

Cato: The 14 most common arguments against immigration and why they’re wrong

National Interest: Why Washington turns a blind eye to Egypt’s thugocracy Ed: Our government has no business worrying about the internal affairs of any foreign nation, thug state or not.  But it’s important to note the selective outrage that emanates from DC in regards to overseas atrocities.  Yemen, for example, is suffering thousands of innocent dead from Saudi Arabia’s U.S.-backed war of attrition and no one in D.C. cares, because Saudi Arabia is a thug state of America’s own making.  Our entire foreign policy could be boiled down into the propping up of various thug states across the globe, whether it be the Saudis, Ukrainian neo-Nazis, among other various and sundry tin pots who are promised American dollars in exchange for the subjection of their people.

On the topic of US-back Neo-Nazis in Ukraine is this just-published gem at The Nation: America’s collusion with Neo-Nazis:   “That stormtroop-like assaults on gays, Jews, elderly ethnic Russians, and other “impure” citizens are widespread throughout Kiev-ruled Ukraine, along with torchlight marches reminiscent of those that eventually inflamed Germany in the late 1920s and 1930s. And that the police and official legal authorities do virtually nothing to prevent these neo-fascist acts or to prosecute them. On the contrary, Kiev has officially encouraged them by systematically rehabilitating and even memorializing Ukrainian collaborators with Nazi German extermination pogroms and their leaders  during World War II, renaming streets in their honor, building monuments to them, rewriting history to glorify them, and more.”

A small note on fascism: Fascism takes root so quickly in populations, with entire populations who insist that they are firmly against fascism yet backpedal into the thing they profess to oppose, because fascist rhetoric appeals to a primitive instinct that resides within all of us.  Fascism is nothing more than a militant tribalism, the fascist program exploits this aspect of human psychology to build power.  Tribalist rhetoric sustains it, and inspires dimwits to murder and die for it.  The fight against totalitarianism, and fascism, is also a fight against that instinct within us.

Cato: Drones on the border: efficacy and privacy implications

Zero Hedge: Trump “all but decided to withdraw” from Iran deal as IAEA refutes Netanyahu speech

Inverse: MDMA successfully treats PTSD in new study, scientists eye FDA approval Ed: On the verge of an historic revolution in medicine, an end of the slavery to deadly, insanity-inducing pharmaceuticals by way of marijuana and psychedelics

Cosmos: How psychedelic therapies are making a comeback