Yes, I’m using “Daily” in the title, despite my inconsistent blogging habit, mainly with the hope of committing to a daily routine here again. And today’s quote comes from page 83 of Jose Ortega y Gasset’s 1932 masterpiece, The Revolt of the Masses:

“Liberalism, it is well to recall this day, is the supreme form of generosity; it is the right which the majority concedes to minorities and hence it is the noblest cry that has ever resounded on this planet. It announces the determination to share existence with the enemy; more than that, with an enemy which is weak. It was incredible that the human species should have arrived at so noble an attitude, so paradoxical, so refined, so anti-natural. Hence it is not to be wondered at that this same humanity should soon appear anxious to get rid of it. It is a discipline too difficult and complex to take firm root on earth.”

The term ‘liberalism’ here used is referring to 19th century “classical liberalism”, the liberalism that held as its noblest ideal that of liberty, and the noblest goal being that of extending the sphere of voluntary cooperation between consenting adults as far as possible, of breaking down the legal prison that every government on the planet had up to then placed around their subjects. That term may be lost today, but the ideas behind it are burning as bright as ever, whether in the marijuana legalization movement, the vaccine choice movement, as well as the various movements to halt and reverse the rapid growth of the total Surveillance State. The most effective way to empower each and every single person in this country, and give them the greatest chance for success in this life, is to expand their ability to choose, to remove every possible barrier to their choices. To advocate for liberty is to advocate for an ideal of unrestricted choice.

KFOR: Officials: Over 35,000 Oklahoma patients have medical marijuana licenses

St. Louis Post-Dispatch: St. Louis officer accused of killing fellow officer in Russian-roulette shooting is booked into jail

Reason: When Reason requested the new L.A. sheriff’s disciplinary records, the deputies union got an injunction to block us

Also Reason: The cops were the aggressors in this week’s deadly Houston drug raid. Ed: A gang of Barney Fifes, living out their Punisher-esque fantasy, busted down the door in a no-knock drug raid, immediately killed the middle-aged couple’s dogs, and then proceeded to murder the couple when confronted with the natural armed response. There is a pattern of police departments hiring those with military fantasies yet could never hack it in the actual military. The end result: innocent dead, a lawsuit, and a city’s taxpayers on the hook for millions.

The Week: The forensic pathologist who shed light on police violence

Slate: We are completely overreacting to vaping

The Verge: San Francisco proposal would ban government facial recognition use in city

TED GALEN CARPENTER: Washington’s incoherent policy towards dictators: “It’s been either self-serving fawning collaboration or hostile meddling. Will Venezuela be any different?”

Libertarian Institute: Venezuela needs to sort itself without US intervention

Independent: US no longer in top 20 least-corrupt countries, major survey finds

Activist Post: Walgreens, Nestle, Coors, and more use iris-tracking cameras to spy on shoppers

Inverse: Tripping brains reveal how the drug creates the psychedelic experience

RCS: Physicists made a flying army of laser Schroedinger’s Cats

Reason: Homeschooling produces better-educated, more-tolerant kids. Politicians hate that.

FEE: The media needs to keep you angry. Don’t feed into it.

Techdirt: Seattle newspaper wins federal court case, opens up reporting on secret law enforcement surveillance

PETER VAN BUREN: Can the new tabloid media ever be redeemed?

High Times: Massachusetts rakes in almost $25 million in first two months of cannabis legalization

Reason: Oklahoma cops jail four men for transporting legal hemp: “Jamie Baumgartner of Colorado, whose Panacea Life Sciences was the intended recipient of the hemp, tells Fox31 that his company ordered the plant from Kentucky, that a manifest on the truck identified the cargo as hemp, and that Panacea Life Sciences’ contractors received “pre-clearance from the State of Oklahoma” to transport hemp through the state on its way from Kentucky to Colorado. This should have been enough to ward off police harassment.”

Techdirt: Judge recommends vacating sentence of one of the FBI’s handcrafted “terrorists”

JIM BOVARD: Attorney General nominee Wiliam Barr’s connection to Ruby Ridge, defending FBI snipers

FEE: Canada’s new drunk driving law will make you thankful for the 4th Amendment

Consortium News: Bases, bases, everywhere…except in the Pentagon’s report

TAC: NATO is a danger, not a guarantor of peace

PAT BUCHANAN: At age 70, time to rethink NATO

Common Dreams: Bring the troops home, but also stop the bombing

The Hill: Amazon shareholders push to halt facial recognition contracts with police

High Times: Terminally-ill patients in Australian hospital to be treated with psilocybin

Futurism: China claims US police are using its facial recognition software

Geek: US cops can’t force you to unlock your phone with face, finger

Barney Fife thinks he’s the Punisher: Mom fights back against cop who pulled gun on her child at bus stop

Washington Examiner: Report: Immigration loophole OK’d 8,686 child marriages in US

Reason: Supreme Court to consider whether police can order blood draws from unconscious drivers

The Intercept: Democratic Party voters are becoming more pro-war than Republicans Ed: Democrats don’t care about Democrat wars, and Republicans don’t care about Republican wars. Party trumps principle every time.

The Federalist: New York Times reveals FBI retaliated against Trump for firing James Comey Ed: Internecine conflict within government should be celebrated.

High Times: Is psychedelic healing in your genes? A team of scientists seeks to find out

Reason: Why drug traffickers laugh at Trump’s border wall

FEE: Canada’s Laffer Curve lesson: government collects less revenue from high-income earners after Trudeau tax hike

Motherboard: AT&T to stop selling location data to third parties after investigation

The Week: The shameful insubordination of John Bolton

JIM BOVARD: Karl Marx and the great socialist revival

RAND PAUL: Americans have a right to boycott, even when it’s wrong

Wired: Synthetic organisms are about to challenge what ‘alive’ really means

Activist Post: “Internet of roads”: Colorado goes all-in with increased radiation and surveillance

Truthdig: The mystery military bases the Pentagon doesn’t want you to know about

Reason: Having won the war against straws, California mulls a crackdown on paper receipts

FEE: Data show California is a living example of the good intentions fallacy

High Times: Vermont Supreme Court rules marijuana smell is not grounds for search

TheFreeThoughtProject: Cop tries to kill woman’s dog, shoots fellow cop in the back instead

Motherboard: The decline of American peyote

Futurism: Physicist: Black holes could be portal for hyperspace travel

The Intercept: Newly-released FOIA documents shed light on border patrol’s seemingly limitless authority

DeepStateBlog: The CIA’s rising profile in politics

Activist Post: DHS has equipped 400 police departments with military-grade sound cannons

Reason: Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel will finally lose his job, over a year after the Parkland shooting

Techdirt: California Supreme Court rejects police union’s attempt to block new open records law

Mises: Ending the war on the non-drug known as hemp

Verge: Carriers can sell your location to bounty hunters because ISP privacy is broken

Two quotes from Thomas Kuhn’s academic powder keg of a book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions:

From page 90:

“Almost always the men who achieve these fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have been either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change. And perhaps that point need not have been made explicit, for obviously these are the men who, being little committed by prior practice to the traditional rules of normal science, are particularly likely to see that those rules no longer define a playable game and to conceive another set that can replace them.” 

And this from pages 137-138:

“Textbooks thus begin by truncating the scientist’s sense of his discipline’s history and then proceed to supply a substitute for what they have eliminated. Characteristically,textbooks of science contain just a bit of history, either in an introductory chapter or, more often, in scattered references to the great lessons of an earlier age. From such references both students and professionals come to feel like participants in a long-standing historical tradition. Yet, the textbook derived tradition in which scientists come to sense their participation is one that, in fact, never existed. For reasons that are both obvious and highly functional, science textbooks (and too many of the older histories of science) refer only to that part of the work of past scientists that can easily be viewed as contributions to the statement and solution of the text’s paradigm problems. Partly by selection and partly by distortion, the scientists of earlier ages are implicitly represented as having worked upon the same set of fixed problems and in accordance with the same set of fixed canons that the most recent revolution in scientific theory and method has made seem scientific.No wonder that textbooks and the historical tradition they imply have to be rewritten after each scientific revolution. And no wonder that, as they are rewritten, science once again comes to seem largely cumulative.”

I read this book a decade ago after repeatedly coming across references to it in various papers on economics. The latter quote struck a chord due to the ludicrous textbook racket prevalent on college campuses. Textbook authors, due to their unique position of supplying what in economics is known as a “captive customer”, or captive market, are in possession of a veritable golden goose, skinning students’ parents for several hundred dollars per book. Of course, a new “edition” of the textbook is issued every year, ensuring that the gravy train will never end. And of course these textbook authors and those that teach from their works do a disservice to young scientists-to-be by implying that nothing more need be learned beyond the textbook.

If there is one thing that should never have a home in scientific inquiry, it is “tradition”, because more often than not it is a tradition artificially imposed upon young minds, a tradition that never actually existed. It’s imposition serves the purpose of pushing heterodox thinkers to the fringes, not to be taken seriously. When tradition is enforced from above, it needs a priesthood to do the enforcing. Pushing out the heretics, coddling the obedient and penitent, and distributing the funding to those who will carry on the tradition.

All this reminds me of another quote, from chapter 8 of William Stanley Jevons’ 1871 treatise, The Theory of Political Economy:

“To me it is far more pleasant to agree than to differ; but it is impossible that one who has any .regard for truth can long avoid protesting against doctrines which seem to him to be erroneous. There is ever a tendency of the most hurtful kind to allow opinions to crystallise into creeds. Especially does this tendency manifest itself when some eminent author, enjoying power of clear and comprehensive exposition, becomes recognised as an authority. His works may perhaps be the best which are extant upon the subject in question; they may combine more truth with less error than we can elsewhere meet. But ” to err is human,” and the best works should ever be open to criticism. If, instead of welcoming inquiry and criticism, the admirers of a great author accept his writings as authoritative, both in their excellences and in their defects, the most serious injury is done to truth. In matters of philosophy and science authority has ever been the great opponent of truth. A despotic calm is usually the triumph of error. In the republic of the sciences sedition and even anarchy are beneficial in the long run to the greatest happiness of the greatest number.”

When we’re kids, we oftentimes fantasize that we are the gunslinging hero of the Western, cop show, or comic book. Even as kids, though, we understand that we aren’t Clint Eastwood, John Rambo, or the Punisher. We separate fantasy from reality. Most of us, anyway. For some, they hide from the guilt and shame of their wasted lives through sustaining this fantasy, and merging it with reality. Which would be hard if they wanted to hold down a job for any extended period of time. Most employers would see the delusional behavior and rid themselves of the crazy person as soon as possible. One profession, however, seems to positively select for delusional nutjobs to fill its ranks: modern-day American policing. In this profession, Barney Fife can act out his Punisher-style fantasies in broad daylight, at the expense of whichever hapless taxpayer happens to bear the brunt of the display. Said taxpayer, when faced with someone in the grips of their militarized fantasy, is at extreme risk of being beaten to a pulp, tased, or shot. And when its over, this Barney Fife receives applause, a paid vacation, and ultimately an expungement of any wrongdoing. The victim either endures the costly, and usually unsuccessful, process of suing the police department. The point is that no real punishment is ever dealt to these sick puppies who don’t hesitate to use violence to fulfill their macho fantasy.

Which brings me to the latest video of a cop unhesitatingly shooting a small, yapping dog. Video here, if you can stomach it. Officer Garbage Human from Faulkner County, Arkansas, is heard and seen telling the owner of the dog: “OK, I’m going to come to you, and if your dog gets aggressive, I’m going to shoot it,” Whereupon he strolls up onto the private property of a private citizen, and casually shoots the small yapping dog in the head.

If there is any giant, pulsing neon sign that points to a psychopath that must be removed from society, it is the murder of a pet. But these people remain on the force, satisfying their juvenile fetish to feel like they are truly the macho badass they want to be. Which of course stems from the fact that they know they are quivering cowards.

Also, most of these knuckledragging, badged psychopaths have very sensitive egos, as so much video evidence will show. Any perceived slight to their authority is met with a quickly escalated encounter, usually ending with the cops wrestling someone to the ground, tasing them, and eventually shooting them.

This cannot continue to happen unchallenged.