S. Smith

Reflecting on the topic of mortality, either of our own or that of family, friend, or some public figure whose lifelong labor will outlive them, inevitably brings out the poetic sense in even the most unfeeling of us. The prospect of libertarian author Justin Raimondo’s mortality, from the news of his battle with cancer, brings to my mind Alfred Tennyson’s Ulysses. Here is my personal favorite excerpt:

“There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:

There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,

Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me—

That ever with a frolic welcome took

The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed

Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;

Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;

Death closes all: but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:

The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep

Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,

‘T is not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

04/12/18 Overnight Links

Posted on April 12, 2018 by S. Smith

New York Times: What you don’t know about how Facebook uses your data

LA Times: Facebook will no longer fund campaign opposing proposed California consumer privacy initiative

Activist Post: The same government that spies on its citizens is lecturing the Facebook CEO for doing the same thing

Breitbart: Master Mark: “We don’t think what we are doing is censoring speech”

MuckRock: Chicago police department coaches officers on how to avoid the same social media surveillance they themselves employ

Al Jazeera: Oil prices soar over fears of a US strike on Syria

Salon: Trump launches a new drug war, but who’s the real enemy?

Reason: It’s good news for libertarians when Paul Ryan quits Congress

FEE: Why the social engineers of the Sixties failed to create a “Great Society”

Cato: Candy-coated cartel: Time to kill the US sugar program

Also Cato: No strategic, tactical, legal, or humanitarian justification for US airstrikes in Syria

Consortium News: International lawyers: Strike against Syria would be illegal

The American Conservative: Trump surrenders to the foreign policy blob : “President Trump recently spoke an essential truth on foreign policy when he stated that American troops should come home from Syria. The Islamic State has been defeated and Washington has no business trying to overthrow Assad, dismember Syria, get between the Turks and Kurds, confront Russia and Iran, and whatever other inane quests the neocon think tanks have come up with.

However, the Blob—as the foreign policy establishment and its extensive network of analysts, pundits, and officials is known—also dominates the president’s staff. Indeed, it is not clear he has anyone working for him, at least at the State Department, Pentagon, and National Security Council, who is not a card-carrying member of the Blob. That means his foreign policy aides spend most of their time trying to talk him out of his most sensible ideas.”

Truthdig: YouTube blocks video criticizing Israeli militarism

In between cancer treatments, Justin Raimondo reflects on the purpose behind his writing and his website

04/11/18 Links

Posted on April 11, 2018 by S. Smith

EFF: The U.S. CLOUD Act and the EU: A privacy protection race to the bottom

Metro: Facebook can predict people’s behavior by spying through their smartphone, patent reveals

WSWS: Behind the Facebook data scandal: The drive to censor the internet

The Hill: It would have taken more than privacy laws to prevent the Cambridge Analytica scandal

Reason: A bunch of Senators just showed they have no idea how Facebook works. They want to regulate it anyway.

Mashable: When ICE asks Facebook for help, Zuckerberg pledges to say ‘no’

National Review: Mark Zuckerberg’s insufferable tripe

The Week: The case for doing nothing in Syria

The American Conservative: Trump’s rush to judgment on Syria chemical attack

SHELDON RICHMAN: Who’s afraid of Russian propaganda?

Activist Post: Homeland Security thinks wearing black means you’re an anarchist

Mises: Why big government, big banks, and big tech all hate cash

04/10/18 Overnight Links

Posted on April 10, 2018 by S. Smith

Reason: Beware censorship by proxy: “Just as one effective end-run around the Fourth Amendment is to ask private companies for data they slurped up on their own, the First Amendment can be sidestepped when officials pressure the private sector into self-censorship. The end result can be rules more restrictive than the companies would impose on their own—and more intrusive than the government could get away with if it tried to impose them directly.”

Washington Post: How the FBI uses the Freedom of Information Act to track down whistleblowers

City Lab: The evolution of domestic spying since MLK in Memphis

Independent: Is YouTube spying on your children? FTC complaint warns of improper data collection

Futurism: World’s most valuable AI startup also happens to be a part of “the world’s biggest system of surveillance”

Bloomberg: America’s virtual border wall is a 1,954-mile-long money pit

The Federalist: How eradicating bad bots can quickly mutate into cracking down on free humans

Variety: Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak deactivates Facebook account over privacy concerns

Mises: What makes AI dangerous? The State.

Techdirt: FBI is using classified tools for regular investigations and that’s going to end up hurting everyone

LA Times: Trump’s impulsive, falsehood-laden call to militarize the U.S.-Mexico border

Volokh: Wells Fargo resists union threats aimed at getting it to drop gun manufacturer clients

Overnight Rothbard

Posted on April 9, 2018 by S. Smith

From his essay, The State vs. Liberty:

“Taxation is theft, purely and simply even though it is theft on a grand and colossal scale which no acknowledged criminals could hope to match. It is a compulsory seizure of the property of the State’s inhabitants, or subjects.”

If taxation isn’t theft, then the implication is that the government owns every bit of your property, allowing you to keep what you currently have as a privilege. In other words, the master/slave dynamic.

04/09/18 Overnight Links

Posted on April 8, 2018April 8, 2018 by S. Smith

The Hill: New push to break deadlock over encrypted phones

Ars Technica: How to keep your ISP’s nose out of your browser history with encrypted DNS

Futurism: Facebook sought medical data. Yes, that should raise red flags.

Activist Post: Homeland Security wants to create profiles of journalists and “media influencers” who mention its name

The Week: Gun owners against police violence

Zero Hedge: How gun control laws for “mentally ill” could disarm those who question authority

Reason: Was Trump elected to take revenge on job-stealing robots? If so, he’s doing great work

The American Conservative: Sinclair and the fake news battle that never ends

WENDY MCELROY: Violence Against Women Act is a true product of Washington’s swamp

Daily Beast: Why does Nanny-State California hate coffee so much?

And more on the bizarre story from Cato: California’s coffee chaos

FreeThoughtProject: Coincidence? Every time the US threatens to pull out of Syria, Assad uses chemical weapons

FEE: Could Amazon buy a country?

High Times: 5 over-the-counter medications that are more dangerous than weed

The Conversation: Best way to solve back pain? Lift heavy things

Overnight Hayek

Posted on April 7, 2018 by S. Smith

From Chapter 6 of his masterwork, The Constitution of Liberty:

“From the fact that people are very different it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position,6 and that the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently. Equality before the law and material equality are therefore not only different but are in conflict with each other; and we can achieve either the one or the other, but not both at the same time. The equality before the law which freedom requires leads to material inequality. Our argument will be that, though where the state must use coercion for other reasons, it should treat all people alike, the desire of making people more alike in their condition cannot be accepted in a free society as a justification for further and discriminatory coercion.

We do not object to equality as such. It merely happens to be the case that a demand for equality is the professed motive of most of those who desire to impose upon society a preconceived pattern of distribution. Our objection is against all attempts to impress upon society a deliberately chosen pattern of distribution, whether it be an order of equality or of inequality. We shall indeed see that many of those who demand an extension of equality do not really demand equality but a distribution that conforms more closely to human conceptions of individual merit and that their desires are as irreconcilable with freedom as the more strictly egalitarian demands.”

04/07/18 Overnight Links

Posted on April 7, 2018 by S. Smith

Thank you for the continued page views. For new readers, this is basically a stripped-down news-aggregation site from the point of view of an active participant in the Ron Paul Revolution. I’ll try to post around 20 stories of the day, depending on the amount of free time I have in the evening. Some nights you’ll get more, and some (like now) you’ll get less. But they are all important for understanding the issues of the day, and offer a perspective you won’t find among more mainstream outlets. Thanks for reading.

Ars Technica: Homeland Security defends media-monitoring database, calls critics “conspiracy theorists”Ed: They want to track journalists and their sources, just like every other authoritarian government since the dawn of man

Motherboard: Facebook promises not to secretly delete more of Zuckerberg’s messages for now

CityLab: Police shootings are also gun violence

LA Times: There’s no pot of gold at the end of a trade war with China

Cato: From “opioid epidemic” to “stimulant epidemic”

FEE: Which state will be the first to suffer fiscal collapse?

Mises: Forget electoral democracy, give “demarchy” a chance

Activist Post: Fake “fake news” is a threat to democracy

Nautilus: Brain implant could help us compete with AI