Reason: Higher minimum wages blamed for closure of iconic NYC coffee shop where Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez worked

Boing Boing: The company you hired to snoop on your kid’s phone just uploaded all their data to an unprotected website

Techdirt: Chinese Surveillance State is basically the U.S. Surveillance State apparatus minus Constitutional rights

The American Conservative: Donald Trump’s foreign policy bait-and-switch

Mises: Why we can’t ignore the ‘militia’ clause of the Second Amendment

FEE: Elizabeth Warren’s ‘New Deal’ is closer to National Socialism than ‘democratic socialism

ACLU: The NSA continues to violate Americans’ internet privacy rights

Truthdig: The militarization of sports and the redefinition of patriotism

Motherboard: After Google and Amazon drop anti-censorship support, Wickr steps in

ASCH: A brief history of the opioid epidemic

The Intercept: The U.S. is building a drone base in Niger that will cost more than $280 million by 2024

FEE: Pediatricians are now writing ‘prescriptions for play’ during well-child visits

Washington Times: A.I.-equipped police: They’re watching, they’re listening, they’ve become the Big Brother we always feared

Reason: This liberal carried an American flag to protest fascism in Portland. Antifa cracked his head open with a bat.

Reason: Air Marshals secretly followed an artsy Virginia mom on flights to make sure she wasn’t going to destroy America

New York Times: The Memphis police spied on activists

Gray Zone Project: Inside America’s meddling machine: The U.S.-funded group that intervenes in elections around the globe

Stay away from my kids, parasite: Army Times: Assisant army secretary sees young teens, college dropouts as next recruiting targets

TAC: Stop comparing Iran to the USSR

DAN McADAMS: My daughter molested by the TSA, me nearly arrested for objecting

JAMES BOVARD: In Washington, the truth has refugee status: “Trump could face a “perjury trap” from Special Counsel Robert Muellerbecause of the unique way that the FBI defines reality — and the truth. The FBI rarely records interviews and instead relies on written summaries (known as Form 302s) which “are widely held up in court as credible evidence of conversations,” the New York Times noted last year. Though defense attorneys routinely debunk the accuracy and credibility of 302s, prosecutors continue touting FBI interview summaries as the voice of God. Even if Trump made factually correct comments to Mueller, he could still face legal peril if his statements failed to harmonize with FBI “trust me on what I heard” memos containing contrary assertions.”

BONNIE KRISTIAN: The drug war is a moral monstrosity. End it. Now.: “There are many reasons to want to end the drug war. We should end it because it has cost more than $1.5 trillion over half a century and yetaddiction rates have not budged. By both historical and internationalstandards, American drug use is persistently high while taxpayers are being bilked for ineffective drug law enforcement.

We should end it because it wastes limited law enforcement resources, with more than 1.2 million arrests made annually for simple drug possession. One in three new prison admissions are drug offenders, making the drug war a major contributor to our national crisis of mass incarceration.

We should end it because its enforcement is demonstrably a tool of institutionalized racism. Though white Americans and racial minorities use illegal drugs at basically the same rate, minorities are more likely to be stopped, searched, arrested, charged, convicted, sentenced to prison instead of non-detention punishments, and given longer sentences for the same crime.

We should end it because decriminalizing drugs in places like Portugal and the Netherlands has proven far more effective at lowering abuse rates and making users feel it is safe to seek help. The opioid epidemic has made harm reduction ever more important.

We should end it because it is inhumane. It leads to broken families and tortuous detention practices. It deprives the desperately ill of treatment options. It makes our cities more violent, just like Prohibition before it. It is literally killing people.”

KTUL: Green the Vote president resigns after marijuana petition count controversy Ed: I disagree that his resignation is the right thing. He pursued a last-minute strategy that didn’t make much sense, and was dishonest, but his organization accomplished something amazing. I wonder how many would have called for his resignation had they surpassed the required number of signatures.

NewsOK: Not enough signatures for recreational marijuana in Oklahoma Ed: Still, Green the Vote collected over 102,000 of the 123,725 signatures needed. That is quite an achievement, and makes reaching the goal next year a virtual certainty.

Stillwater News Press: Stillwater City Council approves medical marijuana zoning

Huffington Post: ACLU: Alex Jones social media bans are ‘worrisome’

Washington Examiner: Silicon Valley bias is real, but Trump shouldn’t pursue a big gov’t fix

LA Times: Forget ICE, the real problem is Customs and Border Protection

The American Conservative: Not one more American life should be expended for Afghanistan

FEE: The pernicious impact of government intervention in healthcare, captured in one chart

Consortium News: Fifteen years of forever wars

Reason: After China complains, Apple removes thousands of ‘illegal’ gambling apps

Antiwar.com: Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery dead at 94

CNET: Google sued over tracking user location amid privacy concerns

The Week: The future of your license plate

Researchers out of Oxford published a paper several months ago, Dissolving the Fermi Paradox, which attempts to confirm what many, including myself, have feared: that extraterrestrial sentient life does not exist, and not only in our galaxy, but in the universe itself.  We should have heard them by now, we should have detected a trail, evidence of some kind. But it’s not there. We may very well be alone, in the infinite void. It’s almost impossible to approach the almost Lovecraftian strangeness of the idea. Better that we turn back to our phones and ignore it. And the absurdity reaches greater proportions when it’s realized that, here we are, alone on a watery blue dot in a vacuum devoid of life, slaughtering, enslaving, and otherwise lording it over others at every opportunity. Is there any picture more pathetic than that? U.S.-made missiles obliterating other people’s children of our species that happen to reside in poor-as-dirt Yemen, on a rock floating in an empty auditorium that has no Creator and has no purpose nor end. And so I marvel at the depravity of our species. But then I listen to this:

Did any other species in this universe produce anything close to Johnson’s masterpiece before extinguishing itself in an orgy of totalitarianism and genocide? Were there any equals to Heifetz or Paganini that arose before their alien governments ripped apart hydrogen atoms over their cities? Will ears in another galaxy, ten billion years from now, hear Cliffs of Dover? Or will we be the only witness? If we govern, regulate, or nuke ourselves to death, at least let the record show that when we were here, that we reached closer to an absolute concept of beauty than anywhere else.  That seems to be the tragedy of our race, that, in the midst of the wanton acts of self destruction, Freud’s death drive on a planetary scale, some of us are able to produce art, music, and culture of incomparable beauty.

The idea that we are alone in the universe has a postscript: We are the beginning of life in the universe. The universe in not old, but young, and we are the first explorers, the first creators, the first engineers of other forms of life. And what appears to be an inevitable self-destruction of our species is just a phase that we will soon outgrow, as we evolve into something more.

From Chapter 8, The Quest for Justice, from Hayek’s indispensable, yet largely forgotten, trilogy, 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.2 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.”

I’ve been pondering lately the correlation I’ve noticed between writing that can’t qualify as “good” in any critical sense, and the originality of a creative genius. I regard Hayek’s trilogy as a true work of genius, yet it is overlong, repetitive, meandering in places. It’s like a road trip along an unmapped highway filled with tourist traps and side quests. Yet without these qualities, would Hayek’s points come through? I think not. I know not. I’ve read books that have been heavily edited, and they are terrible. Yes, there is a sterile perfection about them, clean as a dentist’s office, but the soul of the work has been bleached to death.  There are books, however, that are terribly difficult to read, yet burn with ideas and insights, originality and ephemera and charm. A difficult book that happens to be product of a true creative genius getting his entire, big, messy idea down in print in raw, and relatively coherent, form, is a treasure. This isn’t to say that Hayek is a bad writer, but that his writing has been mostly spared the crippling effect that editing has on works of genius.

This reminds me of the introduction to Robert Nozick’s Philosophical Explanations, which I will leave here:

“I, too, seek an unreadable book: urgent thoughts to grapple with in agitation and excitement, revelations to be transformed by or to transform, a book incapable of being read straight through, a book, even, to bring reading to a stop.”

Tulsa World: Meet the key players in Oklahoma’s medical marijuana community

Activist Post: 65 years ago today, the CIA conspired with the UK to overthrow Iran on behalf of Big Oil

Washington Post: End U.S. support for the misbegotten and unwinnable war in Yemen

The Guardian: We underestimate the threat of facial recognition technology at our peril

GEORGE WILL: America is overdue for another economic disaster

KEVIN WILLIAMSON: The Compulsory Society

72,000 overdose deaths in 2017 CATO: Prohibition is the obvious cause of opioid crisis as CDC releases preliminary casualty numbers for 2017

Reason: Subsidies and price controls aren’t the answer to skyrocketing prescription drug prices

Popular Mechanics: Near-death experience…or psychedelic trip?

Is from the greatest self-help book ever written, Steve Pressfield’s The War of Art: 

“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.”

I came across this book around the Fall of 2014, and it basically shamed me into submitting writing samples to various publishing outlets. I couldn’t bear to have read Pressfield’s book and not taken my own leap of faith. I’m glad I did, because it led to several years of published material across several popular news and opinion sites. It made me realize that, not only could I write, but I could write what others wanted to read. An amazing thing also happened: I stopped caring about anyone’s opinion of my writing. I only cared what I thought of the final product, my internal critic mattered far more than the squabblers in the comments’ sections. There is a thrill to taking leaps like that, it can’t be described. You just have to feel it for yourself. That period of my life was one such time.

Reuters: U.S. gov’t seeks to force Facebook to allow surveillance of Messenger

The Intercept: Google executives misled staff in meeting on China censorship. Here are 13 questions they must answer.

Antiwar.com: No surprise. Bomb that killed over 40 Yemen schoolchildren was supplied by the U.S.

GEORGE WILL: The sprawling, intrusive, administrative state is keeping you unwell

FEE: Thanos, like Malthus, is wrong about population control

JACK HUNTER: What if Russiagate is the new WMDs?

The Federalist: Debunking socialist myths: 90 percent of Scandinavia’s wealth is privately owned

Spectator: The return of Rand Paul

Daily Beast: Last battle of the Vietnam war: Agent Orange and its “presumed diseases”

Axios: Tech’s most egregious violations of user privacy

Business Insider: Psychedelic drugs are making a medical comeback over 50 years after their research heyday

KFOR: Oklahoma agency urges judge not to block new marijuana law

ACLU: Here’s what happens when we allow facial recognition technology into our schools

Mint Press News: TSA defends Orwellian secretive surveillance program

Engadget: Los Angeles will be the first US city to use subway body scanners

Reason: New CDC numbers show the drug war continues to make opioids deadlier

National Review: Colorado defies Supreme Court, renews persecution of Masterpiece Cakeshop baker

BONNIE KRISTIAN: Let Korea fix Korea

Mises: Why the quota system is one of the worst ways of regulating immigration

FEE: Why the Pledge of Allegiance is un-American

KOCO: Yukon, Oklahoma could be sued if city council passes medical marijuana ordinance, attorney says

LA Times: Marijuana isn’t really legal in California if residents don’t have a reasonable way to buy it

Inverse: Now we understand how marijuana makes inflammatory bowel disease bearable

Well, you can apparently make cannabis extract with just a personal espresso machine

Rolling Stone: Matt Taibbi: Censorship does not end well

Gizmodo: Australia hopes to strong-arm tech companies into giving up that precious encrypted data

FEE: Escape from New York: Big Government is chasing away the small businesses it doesn’t kill first

National Interest: Israel is not a liberal democracy

PAT BUCHANAN: America’s lengthening enemies list

Washington Examiner: Abolish the census

National Review: Race hustlers: Corey Stewart and Al Sharpton Ed: Unfortunately, it’s been a pretty good market lately for race hustlers on both the Left and the Right.