Bloomberg: Palantir knows everything about you

Techdirt: Lawmakers ask FBI why it isn’t getting busy cracking its stockpile of seized smartphones

Reason: Public transit becomes another tool for total government surveillance

National Interest: Here are all the reasons striking Syria was a bad idea

Zero Hedge: Army building “self-aware” squid-like robot that can be 3D-printed during combat

AEI: On Earth Day, let’s appreciate fossil fuels

Mises: Fear global warming? Markets offer our best chance for survival

FEE: 18 spectacularly wrong predictions made around the first Earth Day in 1970

American Conservative: State Department report whitewashes Saudi war crimes in Yemen

Antiwar.com: There was nothing humanitarian about our strikes in Syria

Consortium News: Beware of white helmets bearing news

Independent Institute: Think twice about bringing back U.S. manufacturing jobs

City Lab: Getting high is a civil right

The Federalist: Chuck Schumer explains why federalism is right for pot, wrong for everything else.

Reason: In defense of cash

Scientific American: Should quantum anomalies make us rethink reality?

LADbible: People take LSD and then try to assemble Ikea furniture

Here’s an 80-something Hayek discussing the central problem of social theory for modern, complex societies, or what he refers somewhat lightly to as “the knowledge problem”, in the sense that no central authority could possibly acquire and use the virtually endless knowledge produced by all social actors in order to form a plan that wouldn’t end in mass starvation.  And, as forgotten theorist of uncertainty George Shackle noted, we are all planning for an unknowable future, all the time.  So in a sense, multiple futures already exist in our consciousness, and we act in pursuit of those futures based on the actions of everyone else in society, actions which are also the product of minds that are searching in the dark to gain a foothold on one possible future.  Strange, once you think about it.  The next thought inevitably, then, is, “how does society function at all, with so much uncertainty about the future?” Therein lies the central problem that thinkers such as Hayek, Shackle, Keynes, and the modern-day writer Nassim Taleb, in his Incerto trilogy, sought to solve.  With Taleb being a more ostentatious, yet derivative, version of much of Hayek’s later work.  Many creations of culture, products of human action yet not of human design, can be interpreted as a means of alleviating such radical uncertainty. Money, language, interest rates, prices all are part of the invisible web that make social order possible.  I’m going to go ahead and insert an extended quote from Hayek’s famous essay, ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society‘, to further drive home his point about the significance of prices:

“We must look at the price system as such a mechanism for communicating information if we want to understand its real function—a function which, of course, it fulfils less perfectly as prices grow more rigid. (Even when quoted prices have become quite rigid, however, the forces which would operate through changes in price still operate to a considerable extent through changes in the other terms of the contract.) The most significant fact about this system is the economy of knowledge with which it operates, or how little the individual participants need to know in order to be able to take the right action. In abbreviated form, by a kind of symbol, only the most essential information is passed on and passed on only to those concerned. It is more than a metaphor to describe the price system as a kind of machinery for registering change, or a system of telecommunications which enables individual producers to watch merely the movement of a few pointers, as an engineer might watch the hands of a few dials, in order to adjust their activities to changes of which they may never know more than is reflected in the price movement.

Of course, these adjustments are probably never “perfect” in the sense in which the economist conceives of them in his equilibrium analysis. But I fear that our theoretical habits of approaching the problem with the assumption of more or less perfect knowledge on the part of almost everyone has made us somewhat blind to the true function of the price mechanism and led us to apply rather misleading standards in judging its efficiency. The marvel is that in a case like that of a scarcity of one raw material, without an order being issued, without more than perhaps a handful of people knowing the cause, tens of thousands of people whose identity could not be ascertained by months of investigation, are made to use the material or its products more sparingly; i.e.,they move in the right direction. This is enough of a marvel even if, in a constantly changing world, not all will hit it off so perfectly that their profit rates will always be maintained at the same constant or “normal” level.

I have deliberately used the word “marvel” to shock the reader out of the complacency with which we often take the working of this mechanism for granted. I am convinced that if it were the result of deliberate human design, and if the people guided by the price changes understood that their decisions have significance far beyond their immediate aim, this mechanism would have been acclaimed as one of the greatest triumphs of the human mind. Its misfortune is the double one that it is not the product of human design and that the people guided by it usually do not know why they are made to do what they do. But those who clamor for “conscious direction”—and who cannot believe that anything which has evolved without design (and even without our understanding it) should solve problems which we should not be able to solve consciously—should remember this: The problem is precisely how to extend the span of our utilization of resources beyond the span of the control of any one mind; and therefore, how to dispense with the need of conscious control, and how to provide inducements which will make the individuals do the desirable things without anyone having to tell them what to do.”

As an aside, there is something about Hayek’s voice, slight though it is, that seems to wake the dead, or least slumbering child and dog.  I can play Star Trek reruns in the background all night and nothing stirs, but the moment Hayek’s thick Austrian accent begins quietly playing, doggo perks up like her castle is under seige.

From The Road to Serfdom:

“The totalitarian leader must collect around him a group which is prepared voluntarily to submit to that discipline they are to impose by force upon the rest of the people. That socialism can be put into practice only by methods of which most socialists
 disapprove is, of course, a lesson learned by many social reformers in the past. The old socialist parties were inhibited by their
democratic ideals; they did not possess the ruthlessness required for the performance of their chosen task. It is characteristic that both in Germany and in Italy the success of fascism was preceded by the refusal of the socialist parties to take over the responsibilities of government. They were unwilling wholeheartedly to employ the methods to which they had pointed the way. They still hoped for the miracle of a majority’s agreeing on a particular plan for the organization of the whole of society. Others had already learned the lesson that in a planned society the question can no longer be on what do a majority of the people agree but what the largest single group is whose members agree sufficiently to make unified direction of all affairs possible.”

The best way to view the power you wish to grant to government is to imagine that power being wielded by someone who’s political viewpoints you despise.

Activist Post: Senators call on Homeland Security to release info on D.C. cell phone surveillance

ACLU: How an Irish court ruling could affect U.S. spying

Nextgov: DARPA wants to merge human and computer cyber defenders

TechCrunch: Orchid Labs is in the process of raising $125 million for its surveillance-free layer atop the internet

Axios: How Peter Thiel’s Palantir tracks American citizens

Forbes: Bad things happen when you don’t update your privacy settings

The Intercept: The War on Pot marches on: In nearly half the country, marijuana arrests have gone up since 2014

Reason: The war on opioids probably helped kill Prince

The Atlantic: Anatomy of a Silicon Valley pot deal

FEE: Is the U.S. now freer than Europe in terms of pot decriminalization?

Reason: How we lost privacy: “Where people once feared surveillance in their residences, their children now provide the cameras and microphones themselves. Home security systems offer live video streams accessible anywhere. People share their private conversations with devices such as Google Home and Amazon’s Echo. The recent subpoena of an Alexa—the artificial intelligence inside an Echo—that may have “witnessed” a homicide should give all of us pause about what our devices may be recording even when we think they’re not.

That’s the crux of the matter: Even people who resist the idea of the government having our information will willingly open the curtains to private companies—some of whom then turn what they learn over to the government, or leave it vulnerable to hackers. They have our names, our addresses, our bank details, our pictures, our email correspondence, even our current heart rate. Their geotracking knows where we are at any time.”

USA Today: Facebook fights to keep using your face

Activist Post: Police testing controversial portable DNA machine

Techdirt: The war on whistleblowers claims another casualty

BoingBoing: Government accidentally sends file on “remote mind control” methods to journalist

The American Conservative: John Bolton: In search of Carthage

DefenseOne: Pentagon is building an AI factory

Daily Beast: Fake pain pills killed Prince, along with thousands more Americans

Herb: Will psychedelics go corporate like cannabis?

National Geographic: ‘Exploding ant’ rips itself apart to protect its own

Antiwar.com: UN security team delays chemical weapons inspectors from reaching site of supposed attack. Ed: Unbelievable, yet totally believable, that we are inciting another foreign conflict at the very moment that Syria had quelled the “rebels” and peace had been within reach. Unbelievable that just a handful of people in our own government can bypass all of Congress and provoke a widespread, possibly-nuclear conflict over a supposed chemical weapons attack that is said to have killed around 70 people.  Why would Assad attack his own civilians at the very moment an end to the conflict was in sight? And also, why does our own government suddenly care about foreign civilians? Where are the airstrikes on behalf of the thousands of dead Yemen civilians? Oh right, the US is funding the airstrikes that are killing those civilians, via the murderous Saudi regime.  The danger in this situation lies in the fact that so few Americans are willing to get behind a war against either Syria or Russia.  This sets the stage for a convenient attack that will result in the casualties of American citizens, one that will then conveniently be used to steer public opinion in favor of yet another open-ended, decade-long war, conveniently justifying the next trillion-dollar Pentagon budget.

WSWS: As lies of Syrian gas attack unravel, US and UK shift to claims of Russian “cyber war”

Counterpunch: President Trump’s war crime is worse than the one he accuses Assad of Ed: Initiating aggression against a sovereign nation. Punishable by death according to Nuremberg.

BGR: Pay close attention to Facebook’s new passive-aggressive privacy settings

National Review: The bulldozers of social justice

The Intercept: James Comey sees himself as a victim of Trump. He refuses to see the victims of the justice system. Ed: In the interviews of Comey that I’ve watched, I’ve noticed a disturbing trait that I’ve seen before in other people, particularly in political figures and other people who hold positions of power: an absolute belief in their goodness, that they are beyond reproach, that their actions are good in an absolute sense.  These people are the most dangerous because they aren’t hindered by guilt, self-reflection, or humility. Which means they are capable of great damage for a longer duration than others.  I believe that politics naturally attracts this type of person, due to the nature of the work.  “The worst get on top”, as Hayek forcefully argues in The Road to Serfdom. In Comey, it manifests as a vainglorious, petty, sanctimony, and it’s an ugly thing to behold. It’s also the prime move of racists, class-warfare-ists, and general, all-around totalitarians. I believe the instinct is within us all, which is probably the larger point I should be making here, because the nature of government propaganda is to draw it out, to unhinge it from the natural guilt we would feel had our minds not been trained through peer and authoritarian pressure to unleash this primitive prejudice on one group or another.  To government, it doesn’t matter what we wish government to do, as long as we wish them to do it.  It’s the authoritarian instinct unbound that matters.

Reason: A more infuriating way to think about your tax burden

FEE: Why socialism means slavery

Motherboard: Amazon wins patent for data stream to ‘identify’ Bitcoin users for law enforcement

Nextgov: Army figures out how to use facial recognition in the dark

Daily Beast: Unarmed teen killed by police was simply ‘backing his mom’s minivan’ out of garage, lawsuit claims Ed: Let them unionize, protect them from punishment, and they will predictably behave like thugs.

From his essay, Anarchist’s Progress:

“When I was seven years old, playing in front of our house on the outskirts of Brooklyn one morning, a policeman stopped and chatted with me for a few moments. He was a kindly man, of a Scandinavian blond type with pleasant blue eyes, and I took to him at once. He sealed our acquaintance permanently by telling me a story that I thought was immensely funny; I laughed over it at intervals all day. I do not remember what it was, but it had to do with the antics of a drove of geese in our neighborhood. He impressed me as the most entertaining and delightful person that I had seen in a long time, and I spoke of him to my parents with great pride.

At this time I did not know what policemen were. No doubt I had seen them, but not to notice them. Now, naturally, after meeting this highly prepossessing specimen, I wished to find out all I could about them, so I took the matter up with our old colored cook. I learned from her that my fine new friend represented something that was called the law; that the law was very good and great, and that everyone should obey and respect it. This was reasonable; if it were so, then my admirable friend just fitted his place, and was even more highly to be thought of, if possible. I asked where the law came from, and it was explained to me that men all over the country got together on what was called election day, and chose certain persons to make the law and others to see that it was carried out; and that the sum-total of all this mechanism was called our government. This again was as it should be; the men I knew, such as my father, my uncle George, and Messrs. So-and-so among the neighbors (running them over rapidly in my mind), could do this sort of thing handsomely, and there was probably a good deal in the idea. But what was it all for! Why did we have law and government, anyway! Then I learned that there were persons called criminals; some of them stole, some hurt or killed people or set fire to houses; and it was the duty of men like my friend the policeman to protect us from them. If he saw any he would catch them and lock them up, and they would be punished according to the law.

A year or so later we moved to another house in the same neighborhood, only a short distance away. On the corner of the block — rather a long block — behind our house stood a large one-story wooden building, very dirty and shabby, called the Wigwam. While getting the lie of my new surroundings, I considered this structure and remarked with disfavor the kind of people who seemed to be making themselves at home there. Some one told me it was a “political headquarters,” but I did not know what that meant, and therefore did not connect it with my recent researches into law and government. I had little curiosity about the Wigwam. My parents never forbade my going there, but my mother once casually told me that it was a pretty good place to keep away from, and I agreed with her.

Two months later I heard someone say that election day was shortly coming on, and I sparked up at once; this, then, was the day when the lawmakers were to be chosen. There had been great doings at the Wigwam lately; in the evenings, too, I had seen noisy processions of drunken loafers passing our house, carrying transparencies and tin torches that sent up clouds of kerosene-smoke. When I had asked what these meant, I was answered in one word, “politics,” uttered in a disparaging tone, but this signified nothing to me. The fact is that my attention had been attracted by a steam-calliope that went along with one of the first of these processions, and I took it to mean that there was a circus going on; and when I found that there was no circus, I was disappointed and did not care what else might be taking place.

On hearing of election day, however, the light broke in on me. I was really witnessing the August performances that I had heard of from our cook. All these processions of yelling hoodlums who sweat and stank in the parboiling humidity of the Indian-summer evenings–all the squalid goings-on in the Wigwam– all these, it seemed, were part and parcel of an election. I noticed that the men whom I knew in the neighborhood were not prominent in this election; my uncle George voted, I remember, and when he dropped in at our house that evening, I overheard him say that going to the polls was a filthy business. I could not make it out. Nothing could be clearer than that the leading spirits in the whole affair were most dreadful swine; and I wondered by what kind of magic they could bring forth anything so majestic, good and venerable as the law. But I kept my questionings to myself for some reason, though, as a rule, 1 was quite a hand for pestering older people about matters that seemed anomalous. Finally, I gave it up as hopeless, and thought no more about the subject for three years.

An incident of that election night, however, stuck in my memory. Some devoted brother, very far gone in whisky, fell by the wayside in a vacant lot just back of our house, on his way to the Wigwam to await the returns. He lay there all night, mostly in a comatose state. At intervals of something like half an hour he roused himself up in the darkness, apparently aware that he was not doing his duty by the occasion, and tried to sing the chorus of “Marching Through Georgia,” but he could never get quite through three measures of the first bar before relapsing into somnolence. It was very funny; he always began so bravely and earnestly, and always petered out so lamentably. I often think of him. His general sense of political duty, I must say, still seems to me as intelligent and as competent as that of any man I have met in the many, many years that have gone by since then, and his mode of expressing it still seems about as effective as any I could suggest.”

AEI: Facebook’s convenient desire to be regulated

ZDNet: Supreme Court drops Microsoft data privacy case, but the battle isn’t over

Mashable: Facebook’s facial recognition features could cost it billions of dollars in class-action lawsuit

Reason: Comey acknowledges screwing up in encryption fight, but he still doesn’t grasp the issue

Motherboard: UK government is cozy with companies selling spytech

Activist Post: Social media now being used by police and intelligence agencies to collect biometrics

Common Dreams: ‘Astronomical’ costs of war: Average US taxpayer sent $3,456 to Pentagon last year, and just $39 to EPA

Mises: America picks a fight with its largest foreign creditor

The American Conservative: Senators offer up unprecedented war powers to President

FEE: You can’t argue against socialism’s 100% failure rate

Gizmodo: 3 better alternatives to Gmail’s self-destructing emails

Cosmos: ‘Nuclear geyser’ may be origin of life

From his book, Jefferson:

“Throughout his life, Mr. Jefferson consistently maintained that “the most effectual means of preventing the perversion of power into tyranny are to illuminate so far as possible the minds of the people.” He had no doubt that “if a nation expects to be ignorant and free…it expects what never was and never will be.” He seems never to suspected, however, the ease with which mere literacy is perverted, and that it is therefore quite possible for a literate people to be much more ignorant than an illiterate people–that a people of well-perverted literacy, indeed, is invincibly unintelligent.”

This is far more profound than it appears on a first reading.  And it’s not that the mere teaching of reading, writing, and arithmetic that is damaging to the independence of thought of children, but the insidious weaving of propaganda and State-approved theories of social organization into daily instruction.  If only schools would refocus all that energy, wasted into getting kids to accept various social philosophies that prop up the State, solely into reading comprehension, and our country might now have such an abysmally low level of reading ability.

Instead, government-approved versions of history, the worship of the symbols of government through the strangely non-subtle ‘Pledge of Allegiance’, a conditioning to accept a warden/prisoner environment for an unnaturally long time, remain the focal point.