GLENN GREENWALD: Prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing documents poses grave threat to press freedom

TAC: Rand Paul: Saudi Arabia is number one at spreading terror

The Week: The paranoid delusions behind America’s foreign policy

Also TAC: When the “good guy with a gun” is black Ed: There’s a good case to be made for taking guns away from cops. They have plenty of non-lethal options.  And for those who didn’t hear much about the twist in the Trader Joe’s shooting, the employee was shot to death by a cop who fired wildly into the crowded grocery store in an attempt to kill the suspect.

And this from Techdirt: Appeals court: No immunity for shooting a man who had his hands up and twice said he surrendered

Mises: A White House press pass has nothing to do with the First Amendment

Reuters: Pentagon fails its first-ever audit

Reason: The postal service lost $3.9 billion last year

Quillette: The free speech crisis on campus is worse than you think

FEE: What the overpopulation pessimists got wrong (and still get wrong today) Ed: The overpopulation fear is so terrifying because it seems so plausible to those who don’t understand economies of scale, division of labor, and the revolutionary power of innovation. The latest Avengers film even attempted to humanize the villain Thanos by giving him supposedly benevolent intentions behind his desire to kill half the universe. Because the universe is too crowded. Of course. Hitler, of course, used the fear of an overpopulated Germany to gain support for the dehumanization. The true threat is the politicized fear of population growth.

Nooooooo: RIP William Goldman, creator of beloved film, The Princess Bride

National Interest: Veterans are not honored by forever war

DAVID FRENCH: Another police shooting raises hard questions about police restraint Ed: Bystanders allegedly began immediately yelling that the armed guard was, in fact, the person who saved the day, right when police arrived on the scene. The police killed Jemel anyway, despite his uniform with “security” branded right on the front, and also despite the fact that other cops were already on the scene, handling the situation like adults. What explains this other than systematically poor hiring practices, where the applicants selected are the ones most eager to kill someone? It reminds me of DiCaprio’s line in The Departed: “They signed up to use their weapons.” Being a cop in the U.S. today means having wide scope for murdering someone under the guise of, “He was reaching for his wasteband”, or “I feared for my life”.

Wall Street Journal: To make a cup of coffee, it takes more than a village

The Intercept: Google’s “smart city of surveillance” faces new resistance in Toronto

Techdirt: Nice work, EU: You’ve given Google an excuse to offer a censored search engine in China

Reason: HQ2: How Amazon made governments do their bidding for free

Also Reason: Stossel: Why some capitalists are the worst enemies of capitalism

FEE: America’s $21.7 trillion national debt is becoming a “threat to society”, National Security adviser says

Mises: The case against Pharma patent monopolies

TAC: Bolton uses WW1-era rhetoric to promote a cruel Iran policy

Forbes: Surging wealth inequality is a happy sign that life is becoming much more convenient

High Times: LA County sheriff’s deputy allegedly faked raid to rob cannabis facility

Activist Post: National facial recognition database to use loyalty rewards to identify American shoppers

Motherboard: It’s amateur hour in the world of spyware and victims will pay the price

…and murders the black security guard who subdued a drunken gunman at a bar.

Mises: The tragedy of America’s entry into World War 1

Antiwar.com: U.S. post-9/11 wars have killed 500,000 people, according new study out of Brown

Reason: The FDA plan to ban flavored E-cigarettes from most stores is unfair and dangerous

TAC: When “America First” becomes negotiable

The Week: How Saudi Arabia became America’s ally

FEE: F.A. Harper: The greatest threat to liberty is the idea that democracy guarantees freedom

Cato: The ACA’s pre-existing condition regulations lose support when public learns its cost

The Free Thought Project: Facebook is aiding the police state by purging police accountability pages

Activist Post: Tesla technology has been revived

News6: Tulsa medical marijuana dispensary runs out of stock on first day

The Hill: CIA’s ‘surveillance state’ is operating against us all

Techdirt: New York lawmakers want social media history to be included in gun background checks

Antiwar.com: Israel and the trillion-dollar 2005-2018 US intelligence budget

FEE: Venezuela reveals the natural progression of ‘democratic socialism’

Mises: How so many bad ideas manage to win on election day

High Times: California: One year after cannabis legalization

USA Today: FDA approves painkiller 1,000 times more powerful than morphine

RCS: Ripples in space-time could reveal the shape of wormholes

TomDispatch: Pentagon socialism

The Federalist: 9 years into Common Core, test scores are down, indoctrination up

TAC: The mad rush to college is killing our children’s entrepreneurial spirit: “Entrepreneurship, of course, requires time devoted to imagining and dreaming—time today’s students simply don’t have. Many spend every minute trying to build a résumé that will usher them into the best colleges. In The Coddling of the American Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and former Foundation for Individual Rights in Education president Greg Lukianoff argue that, for the last two decades, parents have overscheduled their children to their detriment. To make sure college applications shine, they fill up kids’ time with supervised activities, eroding the hours they need to enjoy playing and simply being young. When you have school, then piano recital, then soccer practice, then choir, then homework, then bed, it’s tough to find time to go skateboarding with your friends. That isn’t a good thing.”

FEE: Stop shaming people who don’t vote Ed: The sheer amount of sanctimoniousness, ignorance, and schoolmarmishness over voting today has been ridiculous. Do these people actually care about ending war? About reducing the prison population? About making everyone’s lives easier and more free? Not at all. The sole issue they care about is that their team wins the game.

Oh HO HO: America’s wars are a non-factor in today’s midterm elections Ed: The vulgar preening over having voted, and ensuring that everyone knew the deed had taken place, reaches absurd levels among the high-income crowd in Norman, as I quickly found out today. There seems to have been an unspoken contest to see who could place their comically lame “I Voted!” sticker as close to their face as possible, without it actually touching. I’m surprised that some of these people don’t actually place it on their forehead, or right between their eyes. “Oh, you voted huh?” “Yes! It’s the most important election in our lifetimes!”, responds someone long past the age where they should know better than to actually believe it. Engaging in mindless conspicuous consumption is apparently next on their list after engaging in their equally mindless act in the voting booth, and my place of employment could not be a more perfect destination. As I take their cash, I idly wish another group of Porsche Cayenne-driving Baby Boomers would breeze in through the door, high on the fumes of counterfeit democracy, and engage the current customers in some meaningless-yet-heated political discussion, quickly devolving into a primitive slap-fight among the elders of two warring tribes. It would almost make voting worth it.

I do not understand the compulsion to make oneself into a flying monkey for a political party, but for the vast majority it appears to be high on the list of basic human instincts.

Now HERE is some real news: MDMA therapy eliminated PTSD in 76% of patients. Ed: This is news worthy of coverage and disk space in your brain, not the meaningless midterms. Psychedelics are a pharmaceutical and mental health revolution in utero. The pharmaceutical industry will cease to exist in its current form once these compounds are made widely and easily available.

Reason: Missouri becomes 32nd medical marijuana state

EFF: Spot the surveillance: A VR experience for keeping an eye on Big Brother

TAC: Jeff Bezos put the Pentagon on his Monopoly board

Common Dreams: Veterans call on active-duty troops to refuse orders to deploy to the border

Consortium News: Break-in attempted at Assange’s residence in Ecuador Embassy

The Federalist: China developing world’s most massive population surveillance system

JUSTIN RAIMONDO: Whatever happened to the Russia-gate scandal?

FEE: Not too big to fail: Why Facebook’s long reign may be coming to an end

High Times: Psychedelic use linked to increased well-being, says pioneering study

CERN: New anti-gravity experiments begin at CERN

The Intercept: Weapons makers rushing campaign cash to Democrat in line to chair defense industry’s key house committee

Reuters: UNICEF: Yemeni children die as warring sides block aid deliveries

Reason: It’s not just one bad apple. Little Rock’s police department is rotten throughout. Ed: Too many cops with what I like to think of as the ‘Barney Fife thinks he’s the Punisher’ syndrome.

FEE: Why the hammer and sickle should be treated like the swastika Ed: It is stupefying that this is not the case. Support for communism/socialism is commonplace, despite a far bloodier record than the Nazi reign.

Cato: Walling off liberty: How strict immigration enforcement threatens privacy and local policing.

ART CARDEN: Are we serious about reducing poverty? Then we need to welcome immigrants

Truthdig: The U.S. military’s empire of secrecy

Activist Post: CIA secretly intercepted Congressional communications about whistleblowers

The Guardian: Weed woes: Canada struggles to meet huge demand for legal cannabis

Motherboard: Pentagon wants to predict anti-Trump protests using social media surveillance

Reason: Despite $900 billion and 2,400 U.S. lives lost, Afghanistan continues to deteriorate Ed: Winning isn’t the goal. Perpetuating the conflict is.

TAC: The costly and irrational Iran obsession

Also Reason: Massachusetts cop charged with kicking Latino teen, spitting on him, saying: “Welcome to the white man’s world”

Washington Examiner: Trump is in denial about the effect of his tariffs

High Times: Mexican Supreme Court declares prohibition of recreational weed unconstitutional

Stars and Stripes: Long trip: Psychedelic advocate nears goal of legal ecstasy

FEE: Stanford dean: 8 basic skills we’re failing to teach young people

JIM BOVARD: We need a #MeToo movement for political consent

The Week: What does a ghost smell like? 

Big Think: Why the number 137 is one of the greatest mysteries in physics

Gizmodo: Why a mission to a visiting interstellar object could be our best bet for finding aliens

SingularityHub: De-extinction is now a thing–starting with passenger pigeons

Republic Reborn is back. And it’s rebirth surely calls for a lengthy, meandering, digressing blog post only tangentially related to the ongoing purpose of this website, in lieu of a shorter, more tightly-written, yet less satisfying series of articles. Of course it does.

I cannot remember a more blustery, rainy, or cold October than this one. It has been glorious, and has provided the perfect backdrop for immersion into Lovecraft, Derleth, one of the Bronte sisters, the obligatory rereading of Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, and new favorite poet, Clark Ashton Smith.

Aside from the diet of gothic and cosmic horror that so perfectly fits into October, I’ve been held in thrall by books I’ve normally considered “summer” reads: the first four novels of Frank Herbert’s Dune series.  Arrakis, or Dune, a desert planet devoid of rainfall, ochre sunsets, the landscape ravaged by the coriolis wind of massive sandstorms, mile-long sandworms that glide under the dunes, the Spartan-esque Fremen natives who thrive there, and, of course, the ‘spice’, the creation of the sandworm life cycle, coveted by the entire universe for its prescience-bestowing qualities that allow for faster-than-light travel, among other qualities that you will just have to read the books to discover.

The world that Herbert created is fascinating, the complexity is such that it seems impossible to have come from just one imagination. A slightly overused trope running through much of science fiction is the ‘War against the Machines’, a la Terminator, The Matrix, Battlestar Galactica, etc. It’s ubiquitous, and Dune is no different, in a sense, excepting the fact that, in Herbert’s universe, humanity had fought and won it’s war against the “thinking machines” millennia before the events of the first book. What is astonishing is that Dune was published in 1966, long before much of the ‘man versus machine’ genre really took off, or even before the potential of artificial intelligence really came into view. Herbert built a universe around the question of what safeguards would the human race put into place in order to prevent another rise of artificial intelligence. One of these is the publication, dissemination, and enforcement of the teachings of the Orange Catholic Bible, the most fundamental lesson of which is contained in the phrase, “Thou shalt not make a machine in the image of a man’s mind”. 

The commandment is pregnant with meaning and weight, and you don’t even really need a novel to understand the amount of blood and war it took for the human race to rebuild anew on top of such a commandment.

Looking at our world today, it appears the fundamental goal of technological progress is to produce such a machine intelligence as soon as possible. What is it in us that drives our species toward such a creation? I’ve recently wondered what latent instincts we are unconsciously playing out over the centuries. Spiders weave webs, beavers build dams, and we work to create our successors. But I digress.

My fascination with Dune is closely connected to the story of T.E. Lawrence, and his adventures in Arabia during World War 1. Aside from the enigma of Arabs giving their allegiance and lives to a 5’2″, 27-year old, white Englishman, and what qualities those Arabs saw in Lawrence that made them disregard everything else, Dune mirrors Lawrence in the fictional character of Paul Atreides, a young outworlder who came to embody the Messiah of Fremen prophecy, leading the Fremen off Dune, and into the universe, with devastating consequences.

Our civilization is rapidly moving to a point nestled somewhere in the unknown future, where we will have to grapple with the question of whether it is wise to build machines “in the image of a man’s mind”.  Automation of every aspect of our lives is a virtual certainty within the next few decades, but what price will it exact in terms of our humanity? The diversion of technological progress into machines that think for us, easing us into a comfortable, mental torpidity that will rob us of our ability to even enjoy life. The very dis-utility of thinking, of grappling with the theoretical, exercising the imagination and apprehending the elliptical, is being bargained away in a strangely Faustian situation where we give away that which makes us most human, our ability to think, in exchange for a passive existence, a freedom from thinking, which is exactly what is being sold by Silicon Valley. What is promised, and what, apparently, is being clamoured for by the culture at large, freedom from thinking, is being given at the price of every other freedom you possess as an individual. A digital Panopticon that would make Bentham blush is being constructed around us, emulsifying our ever-dulling minds in a passive, waking-dream.

As the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood reminds us in Dune, after the war with the machines, mankind had to relearn how to think. The mind was given top priority as something to be improved, not crippled with the easy slavery that thinking machines gave it. Mentats became ‘human computers’, mental disciplines were designed and adhered to with a seriousness and devotion traditionally given to the martial arts.

The lesson of Dune is a warning to our current situation: to regain our freedom, we must relearn how to think.