A watershed moment for marijuana legalization: “The really big advantage of ending marijuana prohibition is not the possible health benefits, but eliminating the harm caused by the arrest and imprisonment of many thousands of people, many of them poor and disadvantaged. The FBI estimates that some 643,000 people were arrested in for marijuana offenses in 2015, including some 574,000 for mere possession. While only a small minority of these arrests lead to prosecution, the arrests themselves can be traumatic and dangerous, and can end up damaging the educational and employment prospects of those targeted. Arrests also often unavoidably create confrontations in which suspects and police officers could be injured or (in rare cases) killed. Over 12,000 people are incarcerated for marijuana offenses in federal prison. I have not been able to locate good recent data on marijuana-related incarceration in state prisons. But the numbers are likely to be much higher. All of these arrests and incarcerations inflict serious harm on suspects, and expend vast amounts of law enforcement resources that could better be employed combating violent crime.”
Hillary’s expensive plan for ‘National Service’. Unleashing a vast, peacetime army of tax-subsidized flunkies, paid to promote loyalty to the State under the guise of patriotism or civic duty or whatever, would be nothing more than PR for a federal government that no one trusts any longer. And it reeks of fascism.
Rogue FBI Twitter bot dumps months of FOIAs
San Antonio cop fired for feeding actual crap sandwich to homeless man
Public schools are probably the gravest threat to privacy today. Taking hi-res photos, fingerprints, compiling detailed information on every student, bundling it up into a nice package, and then…what? Do you think that data will be protected from the Surveillance State’s massive databases?
Wonderful essay by Tom Palmer on Hayek “the Dangerous”: Hayek’s thinking, which is vast and sprawling and a joy to explore, represents a danger to all those who have great ideas for the remaking of society, for the enlistment of the masses in their great plans for authentic existence. Hayek’s individualism was not like Ayn Rand’s, which some have accused (perhaps very unfairly) of shading into a philosophy of superhuman power and thus of rule by the able over the rest of us, but is radically different: it is rooted in the limitations of human reason and the importance of evolved institutions of social cooperation.”
