Common Dreams: With merger pending, Bayer shares plunge after court orders Monsanto to pay $289 million to cancer victim

Activist Post: How Google still tracks you even when ‘location history’ is turned off

Techdirt: Court tells government it can’t search a house just because a suspected drug dealer once parked in its driveway

National Review: Ninth Circuit returns to form, upholds bizarre California gun regulation

Reason: Body camera shows school resource officer handcuffing autistic 10-year-old

Motherboard: The internet is crowdfunding the release of 4,358 secret CIA mind-control documents

Electronic Intifada: Israel destroys Gaza cultural center

PHILIP GIRALDI: Why confronting Israel is important

FEE: How the term ‘social justice warrior’ became an insult

JUSTIN RAIMONDO: Rand Paul stands up for peace

JIM BOVARD: Pathetic Unite the Right and angry Antifa sputter. There’s still time to heed Rodney King.

Re-posting an essential bit of wisdom from page 56 of Hayek’s Law, Legislation, and Liberty:

“From the insight that the benefits of civilization rest on the use of more knowledge than can be used in any deliberately concerted effort, it follows that it is not in our power to build a desirable society by simply putting together the particular elements that by themselves appear desirable. Although probably all beneficial improvement must be piecemeal, if the separate steps are not guided by a body of coherent principles, the outcome is likely to be a suppression of individual freedom.

The reason for this is very simple, although not generally understood. Since the value of freedom rests on the opportunities it provides for unforeseen and unpredictable actions, we will rarely know what we lose through a particular restriction of freedom. Any such restriction, any coercion other than the enforcement of general rules, will aim at the achievement of some foreseeable particular result, but what is prevented by it will usually not be known. The direct effects of any interference with the market order will be near and clearly visible in most cases, while the more indirect and remote effects will mostly be unknown and will therefore be disregarded. We shall never be aware of all the costs of achieving particular results by such interference.

And so, when we decide each issue solely on what appear to be its individual merits, we always over-estimate the advantages of central direction. Our choice will regularly appear to be one between a certain known and tangible gain and the mere probability of the prevention of some unknown beneficial action by unknown persons.”

KFOR: Next meeting for medical marijuana task force will include presentations from law enforcement

The American Conservative: Throwing children away: The school-to-prison pipeline Ed: Essential reading for parents. The “school cop” trend is alarming, cops have no place near our children. A highly-trained security guard from a private firm, who stays far away from the kids themselves? Maybe. But no one hiding behind the corrupting power that a badge confers belongs near children.

Trump’s $400 billion weapons sale to Saudi Arabia is the biggest arms deal in history

Reason: American aluminum manufacturer seeks relief from tariffs meant to help American aluminum manufacturers

The Free Thought Project: UPS workers inadvertently make instructions on how police should deal with dogs WITHOUT killing them

Activist Post: The Idiot’s Guide to the Internet of Things: With an almost 75% failure rate, security experts suggest only idiots would want to hook up every appliance to the internet

FEE: Which countries have the best record in protecting property rights?

Civilized: “I’m not joking when I say medical marijuana is like a miracle”: multiple sclerosis patient

WSWS: America’s unending reign of police terror

NewsOK: University of Oklahoma, Oklahoma State ban medical marijuana

Fox25: Students react to campus ban of medical marijuana

Marijuana Business Daily: Signatures submitted for Oklahoma recreational marijuana ballot measure

High Times: Study finds workplace fatalities dropped in states with medical marijuana

Fast Company: This powerful new “face search” engine could be a privacy nightmare

Consortium News: In a corporatist system of government, corporate censorship is state censorship

The Intercept: Google censorship plan is “not right”, “stupid”, says former Google head of free expression

Also The Intercept: Secret Israeli report reveals armed drone killed four boys playing on Gaza beach in 2014

Zero Hedge: “Serious incident” unfolds as NATO jet accidentally launches secret missile near Russian border

WILL PORTER: Iran sanctions aren’t just counterproductive, they’re an act of war

Reason: Trade war stranded huge ship full of American soy beans at sea

FEE: 5 of the worst economic predictions in history

The Daily Bell: How 3D printing is revolutionizing the housing Ed: Print a Queen Anne and I’ll be sold.

Parents get hit with tough questions out of the blue on a daily basis, and I’m no exception. I’m also fairly inarticulate in my answers, and my explanation of the origin of money to two young children with finely tuned BS detectors went over about as well as an earlier explanation of how birds evolved from a certain class of dinosaurs. Thankfully, YouTube has plenty of videos to clarify the latter. It is fascinating how naturally we are predisposed to ‘intelligent design’ theories of everything around us. That includes not only the natural world, but also the social. The answers to “Who invented money?” and “who created birds?” are very similar, in the sense that the answer lies in a process of evolution over a period of time. No one invented money, no one invented language, no one invented prices, and no one coordinates the vast, richly intertwined kaleidic social world that ebbs, flows, and constantly changes. It coordinates itself without ever being aware of it. Or rather, the daily choices we make as we go about our lives contributes in unknown ways to that social organism, which then assimilates and transmits that data. But our choices are made based on data that comprises the choices of everyone else within the social web. This social world is an endless transmutation, emerging from and acting on a just few fundamental rules.  There is nothing to measure or quantify. Money, raw liquidity in physical form, emerged as a result of the kaleidic evolution of collective choice. No one planned it, no one created it.

What economists study is choice made in the face of not merely scarcity, and not merely the data produced by the invisible social web that comprises all other choice-making actors, but also their own imagination of what the future holds. There is no ‘creation’, and can be no ‘Creator’ in social life, something that ‘socialists’ must urgently realize. Intelligent Design theories of economics culminate in the belief that the social sphere can be centrally planned. It can’t, as the entire 20th century attests to. Venezuela is currently providing laboratory conditions for how society rips itself apart when an authoritarian attempts to control it.

Kaleidic change is the fundamental characteristic of evolution, both in the natural world as well as in the social.  This matters for proponents of liberty because the essence of libertarianism is an openness to all change that emerges from what Hayek dubbed the ‘spontaneous forces’. Whatever emerges from the collective voluntary, unrestrained actions of billions of people, we accept.  We defend the process, not the outcomes.

That’s not quite what I relayed to my children.

CNBC: Monsanto ordered to pay $289 million in California Roundup cancer trial

The Guardian: Julian Assange ‘seriously considering’ request to meet U.S. Senate committee

National Review: The rise of illiberal artificial intelligence

Washington Post: Was a 5-year old migrant boy drugged after being separated from his father at the border?

Techdirt: 9th Circuit denies cops who shot innocent people 15 times qualified immunity for the second time

The Free Thought Project: VIDEO: Cops set up “bait truck” in low-income neighborhood to entrap poor people

DAVID HARSANYI: Social media giants shouldn’t be arbiters of appropriate speech

JIM BOVARD: Should gun owners fear the Deep State?

The Federalist: Why voters rated Oklahoma’s Mary Fallin the worst governor in America

Slate: China’s aggressive surveillance technology will spread beyond its borders

Foreign Policy: Ecuador’s all-seeing eye is made in China

Mises: Big Tech shows ‘Net Neutrality’ battle was about power, not ‘open internet’

Reason: TSA no longer keeping ‘quiet’ about citizen surveillance program

ACLU: Memphis police surveillance of activists is a betrayal and a reminder

EFF: EFF Amicus brief: The Privacy Act requires the FBI to delete files of its internet speech surveillance

Inverse: Cryptography may hold the key to preventing a surveillance dystopia

National Review: Memo to Google: Don’t go back to China

TAC: Yes, the press helps start wars

Also TAC: The conservative case against the death penalty

Antiwar.com: Saudi airstrike on Yemen school bus leaves at least 50 dead, mostly children

FEE: We shouldn’t send a new generation of soldiers to fight the “War on Terror”

The Nation: Who profits from our prison system?

The Week: The health dangers of “service with a smile”

The Mary Sue: Cry along with Patrick Stewart as he announces Jean-Luc Picard’s return

The Intercept: Inside Google’s effort to develop a censored search engine in China

The Hill: Don’t let Big Tech become Big Brother

New Republic: Big Tech’s military dilemma

Activist Post: Julian Assange asked to testify in front of Senate

Reuters: Apple tells lawmakers iPhones are not listening in on consumers

The Atlantic: Congress can finally tell hemp from pot

Techdirt: Cops go to wrong house, kill innocent man, receive a free pass from local grand jury

Reason: Trump’s trade war kills another 126 jobs

Metro Times: The Detroit Psychedelic Conference brings the international science of consciousness home

Activist Post: Twitter suspends libertarian accounts, including Ron Paul Institute director

National Review: To limit the Second Amendment, New York attacks the First

Techdirt: Funneling Trump rally attendees directly into a violent anti-Trump crowd costs officers their qualified immunity

Washington Post: Warrantless device searches at the border are rising. Privacy advocates are suing.

The Federalist: The InfoWars bans aren’t about Alex Jones, but about Big Tech’s control of what we have access to

Reason: New Iran sanctions inflame tensions, isolate the U.S.

Yeah right: USA Today: Marijuana breathalyzer aims to detect high drivers “without unjustly accusing”

Green the Vote, the activist group that has been out in force the past few months gathering signatures for State Question 797, which would legalize recreational marijuana in the state, didn’t reach anywhere close to the number required to put the question on the November ballot, despite claiming it reached that number in late July.  The story here.

So Green the Vote’s president Isaac Caviness made an executive decision to make the false claim to the media that they had surpassed 120,000 signatures, despite only gathering around 32,000.  His rationale was strategic: if Oklahomans perceived momentum or popularity in the recreational marijuana movement, it would energize them to get involved too.  But if he wanted to get more signatures, why not say they were 5,000 short, or 10,000? If everyone thought that they’d surpassed the required number, wouldn’t that make prospective signature-givers stay home instead?  The strategy wasn’t only short-sighted, it just didn’t make any sense.

Caviness also sacrificed the credibility of recreational marijuana supporters by making them appear dishonest to the rest of the state. The only contact many Oklahomans may have with the recreational movement may be in the form of the many articles written about Caviness’s deception. So his strategy not only failed in the short run, it just made future recreational activism that much more difficult.

Caviness did mean well: he had only the welfare of the movement in mind, but strategies like this cannot be viewed as a viable option.

The only effective strategy for libertarians in this state is honesty and hard work. Deception, dirty deals, compromise will poison this movement, and render it utterly ineffective.

I will say, however, that the 797 petitioners are some of the most hard-working, dedicated volunteer activists I’ve ever witnessed. If Oklahomans ever get a taste of a more free, more peaceful society, it will be due to the work of these anonymous volunteers working behind the scenes.