News OK: Oklahoma medical marijuana supporters cry foul over THC limits

KFOR: Pro-cannabis advocates rally at Oklahoma State Capitol

NORML executive: The case for whole-plant cannabis

Fox: Big Tobacco makes first investment in marijuana industry

The Intercept: Former Obama officials help Silicon Valley pitch the Pentagon for lucrative defense contracts

Hartford Courant: Face-scanning technology threatens privacy

Truthdig: Immigrant shelters drug traumatized teens without consent

The Federalist: Poll: Americans don’t give a hoot about so-called Russian collusion

Reason: Can bitcoin become the global monetary standard?

Tulsa World: State Question 788 takes effect this week. What do you need to know?

News OK: OSBI investigating Oklahoma Pharmacy Board executive director

EFF: California can pioneer local community oversight of police surveillance

Mises: 6 reasons why a trade war with China is pointless

FEE: Capitalism has accomplished what Marxism merely promised

The Intercept: Ecuador will imminently withdraw asylum for Julian Assange and hand him over to the UK. What’s next?

Boing Boing: Authoritarians used to be scared of social media, now they rule it.

Buzzfeed: A cop involved in Eric Garner’s death is facing his first disciplinary charges. 4 years later.

Techdirt: Cop costs taxpayers $60,000 and one drug bust after lying about almost everything related to traffic stop

URI AVNERY: Israelis just keep killing people and stealing land

This kind of overt corruption is what prison is actually for: NewsOK: Pharmacy board head allegedly offered official a job to sway marijuana rules Ed: What is amusing about all of this is that Julie Ezell, the former Health Department attorney accused of sending threatening messages to herself, will probably flush out all the offending players in this charade. Let’s release a few thousand non-violent offenders and make room for these idiots.

Oh yes: KTUL: Oklahoma prosecutor seeks expanded probe over text messages

KOCO: Oklahoma legislative leaders form 13-member marijuana panel

Activist Post: Thousands of scientists sign pledge against developing lethal A.I.

National Review: The Ninth Circuit protects gun rights and stops confiscation

The Federalist: No, Montenegro is not essential to U.S. national security interests

Al Jazeera: UK using child spies in police operations

CFR: The rise of China’s Security-Industrial Complex

Gizmodo: Hack can turn robotic vacuum into creepy rolling surveillance machine

Biometric Update: UK mayor contemplates using facial recognition tech to catch litterbugs

Financial Times: How police forces use data to assess risks and predict crime

The Intercept: Chaos prevails in immigrant detention centers, with children under 5 still separated from parents

Reuters: Palestinians in Jerusalem demolish own homes rather than see Israeli settlers move in

WSWS: Israeli parliament passes apartheid-style ‘Nation-State’ law

Fox: Pentagon makes massive AI push for tanks, ships, weapons, drones, and networks

FEE: What the origin of money teaches us about spontaneous order

Marijuana.com: Fake emails, felony charges, and Attorney General’s intervention: A dramatic 48 hours in Oklahoma marijuana policymaking

KFOR: Attorney general advises health board to convene special meeting to amend medical marijuana rules

 ABC Tulsa: Gov. Fallin says Board of Health should rescind medical marijuana rules

Civilized: Native American tribes won’t allow medical marijuana in Oklahoma

High Times: Cannabis illicit market shrinking, new DEA, Homeland Security numbers suggest

New York Post: Marijuana may help fight cancer

Check out the video in the article: The Federalist: Sacha Baron Cohen tried to trick this gun store owner, who wasn’t having any of it

Techdirt: ‘Smart’ TVs remain the poster child for dismal privacy, transparency and security standards

Reason: When code is speech, tech like 3D-printed guns sees greater protection from censorship

National Review: Brett Kavanaugh and the Supreme Court’s Fourth Amendment mess

Ars Technica: Judge slams FBI for improper cellphone search, Stingray use

The Week: Can blockchain fix America’s voting system?

NOLA: Study finds a brain on psychedelic trip looks as active as a growing baby’s: report

Good god: NewsOK: Top attorney for Health Department who resigned last Friday charged with felony after OSBI determines she sent threats to herself. Ed: She sent herself death threats and then claimed they came from disgruntled pro-788 activists. My question is why would someone in her position in power, knowing her crime would be discovered, engage in this behavior?

KOCO: Official says procedure could keep recreational marijuana off November ballot

Tulsa World: 10 things medical marijuana patients would not be allowed to do under SQ 788

The American Conservative: Cronyism in action: Government’s cozy ties to Big Tech and Big War

WIRED: Schools can now get facial recognition tech for free. Should they?

ZDnet: Tech giants, civil liberties coalition urge Congress to pass email privacy law

EFF: Undermining mobile phone users’ privacy won’t make us safer

Washington Post: How your data is used by the police, and where it goes wrong

Washington Times: “Buy America”: U.S. arms sales increase despite Trump’s tough talk on NATO, trade

Mises: The EU’s new data protection rules are already hurting Europeans

The Hill: Children are one of the War on Drugs’ casualties

The Intercept: Brett Kavanaugh repeatedly ruled in favor of the National Security State, most recently for the CIA, and against me

The Federalist: Communists brutally murdered Russia’s last royal family 100 years ago today

The American Conservative: The war on Yemen’s invisible victims

Charlotte Observer: What data on 20 million traffic stops can tell you about ‘driving while black’

FEE: The second Social Security crisis nobody is talking about

Oh no: Massive: Pulling all-nighters could permanently damage your brain

In light of the revelation that the Oklahoma Department of Health’s attorney, Julie Ezell, sent herself fake threats of harm via email and then claiming it came from the pro-788 activist camp, I thought it would be suitable to revisit a few passages from a few of my favorite writers, Friedrich Hayek and Albert Jay Nock. First, Hayek, from Chapter 10 of his The Road to Serfdom, Why the Worst Get on Top:

“There are strong reasons for believing that what to us appear the worst features of the existing totalitarian systems are not accidental byproducts, but phenomena which totalitarianism is certain sooner or later to produce. Just as the democratic statesman who sets out to plan economic life will soon be confronted with the alternative of either assuming dictatorial powers or abandoning his plans, so the totalitarian dictator would soon have to choose between disregard of ordinary morals and failure. It is for this reason that the unscrupulous and uninhibited are likely to be more successful in a society tending towards totalitarianism. Who does not see this has not yet grasped the full width of the gulf which separates totalitarianism from a liberal regime, the utter difference between the whole moral atmosphere under collectivism and the essentially individualist Western civilization.”

And now, Nock, from his wonderful essay, Prohibition and Civilization:

“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.”

From Chapter 9, ‘Social’ or distributive justice, of his profound Law, Legislation, and Liberty:

“As primitive thinking usually does when first noticing some regular processes, the results of the spontaneous ordering of the market were interpreted as if some thinking being deliberately directed them, or as if the particular benefits or harm different persons derived from them were determined by deliberate acts of will, and could therefore be guided by moral rules. This conception of ‘social’ justice is thus a direct consequence of that anthropomorphism or personification by which naive thinking tries to account for all self-ordering processes. It is a sign of the immaturity of our minds that we have not yet outgrown these primitive concepts and still demand from an impersonal process which brings about a greater satisfaction of human desires than any deliberate human organization could achieve, that it conform to the moral precepts men have evolved for the guidance of their individual actions.”

I’ve noticed a strange tendency among those that scoff at adherents of an intelligent design theory of life and the universe simultaneously, and ironically, adhere to an identical theory in the economic realm, in the sense that the processes of the economy have been created by some single entity, and can be successfully controlled and directed by an all-powerful entity, almost always the government.  20th century communism proclaimed atheism, despite worshiping an all-powerful State and bestowing upon it unlimited power to interfere in the market, with hideous consequences.

KOCO: People cite rules for SQ 788 as reason for signing recreational marijuana petitions

And more: Marijuana.com: Marijuana restrictions may make Oklahomans mad enough to vote

Tulsa World: Oklahoma attorney general will advise Dept. of Health on legal challenges to SQ 788 rules

We’re making the news a lot lately: High Times: Oklahoma Republicans join fight against medical marijuana restrictions

Techdirt: Oregon Supreme Court sets up new limits for digital device searches

New York Times: Looking through the eyes of China’s Surveillance State

The Verge: How AT&T’s plan to become the next Facebook could be a privacy nightmare

The Federalist: Why the world no longer needs the Cold War’s NATO

Reason: Florida police chief charged with arresting random black men to improve his department’s record

LEW ROCKWELL: The Police State abolishes the trial

WSWS: British and Ecuadorian authorities in talks to evict Julian Assange from London embassy

Ars Technica: Dangerous plutonium stolen from rental car in a hotel parking lot

The real questions from Forbes: How large is the unobservable universe?

NewsOK: Only 20,000 more signatures needed for recreational marijuana petition, organizers say

High Times: New Yorkers may now replace opioid prescriptions with medical marijuana

ABC: Detaining immigrant kids is now a billion-dollar industry

Forbes: An Israeli startup raises $12.5 million to help governments spy on IoT

The American Conservative: Keeping cops’ hands out of your pocket

Activist Post: Jury nullifies Georgia marijuana law, finds man not guilty despite admitting to growing weed

Washington Times: Rand Paul undecided on Brett Kavanaugh, disagrees with Fourth Amendment ruling

FEE: Washing machine tariffs started the trade war. Result? Largest-ever three-month increase in washing machine prices

The Intercept: Trump finds a new weapon for his war on journalism: Leak indictments aimed at smearing reporters

Also The Intercept: With last charges against J20 protesters dropped, defendants seek accountability for prosecutors

CATO: Subsidies galore: corporate welfare for politically-connected businesses is bipartisan

USA Today: Microsoft raises alarm about facial recognition

Reason: Innocent until proven guilty, but only if you can pay

From Chapter 8, The Quest for Justice, from the second volume of Law, Legislation, and Liberty:

“Strictly speaking, only human conduct can be called just or unjust. If we apply the terms to a state of affairs, they have meaning only in so far as we hold someone responsible for bringing it about or allowing it to come about. A bare fact, or a state of affairs which nobody can change, may be good or bad, but not just or unjust. To apply the term ‘just’ to circumstances other than human actions or the rules governing them is a category mistake. Only if we mean to blame a personal creator does it make sense to describe it as unjust that somebody has been born with a physical defect, or been stricken with a disease, or has suffered the loss of a loved one. Nature can be neither just nor unjust. Though our inveterate habit of interpreting the physical world animistically or anthropomorphically often leads us to such a misuse of words, and makes us seek a responsible agent for all that concerns us, unless we believe that somebody could and should have arranged things differently, it is meaningless to describe a factual situation as just or unjust.

But if nothing that is not subject to human control can be just (or moral), the desire to make something capable of being just is not necessarily a valid argument for our making it subject to human control; because to do so may itself be unjust or immoral, at least when the actions of another human being are concerned.”

Reading Hayek is an acquired skill. His tendency to place his most important insights somewhere within 100-word sentences that require multiple readings and ponderings to fully digest his meaning can be exhausting to the first-time reader.

But one thing I’ve found when reading Hayek’s books for a second or third time, is that it’s not quite the same book.  What appears as needless redundancy reveals itself to be deeper insights into the phenomena of spontaneous order, it’s functioning, and the rules needed that create the environment for it to form. Once you’ve acclimated yourself to his surgically precise, yet lengthy, writing style, you realize he’s not repeating himself anywhere. There’s nothing extra here, Hayek has distilled his explanation of spontaneous order as far as possible without pouring the liquid out.  I also remain convinced that the most invincible, most convincing defense of liberty lies within the pages of Hayek’s trilogy.