Reason: Google and privatized authoritarianism
High Times: FBI data shows cannabis arrests are on the rise for second year in a row
FEE: The New York Times explains why the minimum wage should be $0
Antiwar.com: Yemen civilian deaths skyrocketing since June
SHIKHA DALMIA: The weaponization of Milton Friedman
Rolling Stone: Study: MDMA could help autistic adults with social anxiety
Reason: A father defends his daughter with a shotgun when cops break into the wrong house
Techdirt: Hell forms bobsled team after police chief admits fault in SWAT raid targeting wrong address
The Week: Wall Street’s reefer madness
High Times: Epileptic 5-year old may now bring cannabis-based medicine to school
The Intercept: Google suppresses memo revealing plans to closely track search users in China
FEE: How the housing crisis vindicated the Austrian School of Economics
RON PAUL: Republicans’ responsibility for socialism’s comeback
The Federalist: Why insider trading shouldn’t be illegal
Techdirt: California police officers used self-destructing messaging app for years
RCP: War on vaping threatens public health
High Times: Canada estimates $1 billion in cannabis sales in the first three months
GRACY OLMSTEAD: We weren’t made for endless work: “It is easy to slip into distractedness and inattentiveness if we are not cultivating daily rhythms that emphasize the present and the real over the possible and the virtual. That’s why Sherry Turkle suggests that we carve out “sacred spaces” in our day in which we set aside our devices and seek to truly focus on each other. The dinner table is a good space for this—but I also feel that I could do a better job abandoning my devices for intentional daily spurts of play with my daughter. Otherwise, leisure is too quickly interrupted by a text or email or phone call.
We don’t always like to hear that rest and “play” can nourish our souls. Owning up to that truth would require slowing down and doing “unimportant” things with no material, measurable benefit. It would require acknowledging our need for grace, and our own inability to accept the world as gift. But our existence was never meant to fixate around work—at least not if the ancients are to be believed. Leisure makes us human.
So go on a walk tomorrow and search for “tiny perfect things.” Play a board game after the dinner dishes are put away. Read a favorite book aloud. Pull out the sidewalk chalk.”
FreedomPress: Revealed: The Justice Department’s secret rules for targeting journalists with FISA court orders
Techdirt: State cops accidentally out their surveillance of anti-police groups with browser screenshot
New York Times: Trump has it backward: Many migrants are victims of crimes
FEE: How a minimum wage hike wiped out 40% of Venezuela’s stores
Forbes: America ‘one of 45 countries’ infected by super-powerful Israeli smartphone spyware
Mondoweiss: Israel says it is “entitled to violate the sovereignty of foreign countries”
DOUG BANDOW: Washington’s endless sanctions are finally backfiring
The Federalist: Google turns evil in willingness to collude with China’s repression
National Interest: Assad has won and America must go
High Times: What do the colors of marijuana mean?
Ars Technica: Quantum mechanics can’t handle quantum observers that know quantum mechanics
A quote that I’m sure I’ve posted before, from his 1939 essay, published in Mencken’s American Mercury, Albert Jay Nock’s The Criminality of the State:
“The weaker the State is, the less power it has to commit crime. Where in Europe today does the State have the best criminal record? Where it is weakest: in Switzerland, Holland, Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, Sweden, Monaco, Andorra. Yet when the Dutch State, for instance, was strong, its criminality was appalling; in Java it massacred 9000 persons in one morning which is considerably ahead of Hitler’s record or Stalin’s. It would not do the like today, for it could not; the Dutch people do not give it that much power, and would not stand for such conduct. When the Swedish State was a great empire, its record, say from 1660 to 1670, was fearful. What does all this mean but that if you do not want the State to act like a criminal, you must disarm it as you would a criminal; you must keep it weak. The State will always be criminal in proportion to its strength; a weak State will always be as criminal as it can be, or dare be, but if it is kept down to the proper limit of weakness – which, by the way, is a vast deal lower limit than people are led to believe – its criminality may be safely got on with.
So it strikes me that instead of sweating blood over the iniquity of foreign States, my fellow-citizens would do a great deal better by themselves to make sure that the American State is not strong enough to carry out the like iniquities here. The stronger the American State is allowed to grow, the higher its record of criminality will grow, according to its opportunities and temptations. If, then, instead of devoting energy, time, and money to warding off wholly imaginary and fanciful dangers from criminals thousands of miles away, our people turn their patriotic fervor loose on the only source from which danger can proceed, they will be doing their full duty by their country.”
The Intercept: Government can spy on journalists in the U.S. by using invasive foreign intelligence process
ACLU: Some schools need a lesson on students’ free speech rights
Free Thought Project: Grandma allowed cops to search her garden for drug dealer and their K9 mauled her to death
Reason: Will World War 3 be fought by robots?
ROB FAUST: The expanding military blob
The Federalist: We need to know if intelligence agencies covered up the 1996 crash of TWA 800
Techdirt: State legislator says 11 year-old tased by cop deserved it and her parents probably suck
National Review: Nixing regulations saved taxpayers $1.3 billion this year
FEE: Why Congress must stop deferring its authority to the Executive branch
RYAN MCMAKEN: Capitalism makes us more humane
High Times: First ever trial to study the effects of microdosing LSD began this month
What. The. Heck? Popular Mechanics: FBI mysteriously close National Solar Observatory in New Mexico
The Intercept: Senior Google scientist resigns over “forfeiture of our values” in China
Techdirt: European Court of Human Rights: UK surveillance revealed by Snowden violates human rights
Activist Post: A brief history of repressive regimes and their gun laws
The Week: The case for the American bobby
National Review: Did France’s gun control hurt its resistance to the Nazis?
JIM BOVARD: Barack Obama’s return just reminds us how he fueled the distrust that led to Trump
JUSTIN RAIMONDO: Defeat the Deep State: “The Deep State – i.e. the constellation of national security agencies and private actors who have directed and maintained our globalist foreign policy since the end of World War II – would have targeted Trump in any case, due to his hostility to their interventionist foreign policy. And yet I believe they would’ve gone after him anyway due to his populist outsider persona, which the self-appointed guardians of the Empire consider dangerous per se.
The bottom line is that the intelligence services of the United States, and top officials of the FBI, have indeed launched a regime change operation comparable to the dozens carried out by these very same spooks over the years from Latin America to the Middle East. Like most of these campaigns, it’s a multilateral effort, with the intelligence services of at least three “allied” countries involved. Co-authored with the Clintonistas, the Russia-gate hoax is their invention: it was the perfect pretext to conduct surveillance on a rival presidential campaign. For all the talk of “collusion,” the real colluders were the Obama administration and the Clinton campaign organization who utilized the British “former” MI6 agent, Christopher Steele, and his infamous dossier. This fake intelligence was used by the Justice Department to justify spying on Carter Page, George Pappadapoulos, and other Trump campaign contacts.”
Reason: DHS gave ICE an extra $169 billion to detain and remove immigrants last month
Tulsa World: Cherokee Nation: Oklahoma’s medical marijuana law holds no weight on tribal lands
Public Radio Tulsa: Oklahoma Medical Marijuana Authority swamped with applications
The Federalist: America’s forever war in Afghanistan engulfs a new generation
Counterpunch: The original 9/11: 45 years after Pinochet’s coup
The Intercept: The U.S. goes to war against the ICC to cover up alleged war crimes in Afghanistan
High Times: Manhattan DA drops over 3,000 marijuana cases dating back to 1978
RYAN MCMAKEN: Cop Amber Guyger is one reason we need private gun ownership
Motherboard: The EU can still be saved from its internet-wrecking copyright plan
Techdirt: Couple gets back $10,000 seized by state trooper after local media starts asking questions
Reason: Watchdog sues to expose secret government kitten killing
DAVID FRENCH: The worst police shooting yet
The Federalist: U.K. police urge citizens to report neighbors for “offensive or insulting” speech
Vox: The TSA has a new program that could spy on you. It’s also a massive waste of money.
Reason: Classy: TSA uses 9/11 anniversary to debut new slogan
TAC: Washington quietly increases lethal weapons to Ukraine
Activist Post: Grand jury finds police were complicit in covering up massive child sex ring in Catholic church
JAMES BOVARD: Freedom frauds: Are we all terrorists, 17 years after 9/11?
New Republic: Why are drug users being charged with murder?
High Times: The anatomy of a marijuana plant
Comes from Shackle’s singular 1972 work, Epistemics and Economics:
“If there is a fundamental conflict between the appeal to rationality and the consideration of the consequence of time as it imprisons us in actuality, the theoretician is confronted with a stark choice. He can reject rationality or time. The theory which rejects time has certain technical features, often referred to as, respectively, subjective marginalism, the market mechanism, and partial equilibrium…
…The other road consists in abandoning, not the word ‘time’, but its meaning of a forceps which grips us between the past which is unchoosable and the future which is unknowable.”
Shackle’s Orphic prose accurately captures the strangeness of our predicament. We are, in a sense, imprisoned by time. Despite that, our species moves through time and into an unknowable future and not only survives, but thrives. The strangeness stems from the fact that it shouldn’t be possible beyond the most basic of plans. Yet complex plans are carried out, economic calculations are accurately made, people are fed, clothed, housed, entertained, etc. And not in spite of the complexity of society, but because of it. The greatest attribute of our species is its ability to unwittingly generate vast cultural and social complexity as a way to solve the problems of time and ignorance.