And now for something entirely different: The greatest single piece of music ever written for solo violin, performed by Jascha Heifetz, the greatest violin who has ever lived.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbX3frq3Qyo

Splinter: Muslim Americans win landmark victory against the NYPD’s post-9/11 spying

ACLU: Californians are winning the fight against secret surveillance

Mashable: Activists show up at Facebook HQ to demand better privacy

Gizmodo: Facebook backs off of creepy hospital data-sharing project for some reason

Washington Post: A power that lets police take property for themselves, even when there’s no crime

Ars Technica: Google employees revolt, say company should shut down military drone project Ed: Everyone, and every company, has a price, regardless of whether or not your slogan is “Don’t be evil”

New York Times: Trump’s irrational border plan

Mises: Starbucks and Dick’s can be anti-gun if consumers will let them.  Ed: This article makes an important point. Namely, that property rights trump all other rights.  Property rights, indeed, are the foundational right, from which all other rights spring, you could say.  Which means that, regardless of what the government says about your right to “bear arms”, my rules about what happens on my property supersedes your right to carry a weapon when on it.  If I open a business, it is my right to allow or prohibit firearms as I see fit.  If I open cake-baking business, it is my right to do business with whom I choose.  The ability to choose with whom to interact, the ability to discriminate among people, businesses, organizations, etc., is the essence of liberty.  Forced interaction should be labeled plainly as slavery, which it most certainly is.  Liberty eliminates the master/servant relationship.

Times of Israel: Twitter: 1 million accounts suspended for ‘terrorism promotion’ since 2015

Techdirt: More governments granting themselves extra censorship powers with “fake news” laws

Activist Post: New surveillance camera software allows law enforcement to identify groups of people in real-time

Reason: No, Starbucks coffee won’t give you cancer. But California regulations will let people sue your roasting business into oblivion.

FEE: Venezuela’s president tackles economic crisis by deleting 3 zeroes from currency

Also FEE: China’s ‘Social Credit’ system sounds pretty dystopian, but are we far behind?

High Times: Legal marijuana sales could surpass soda sales by 2030 Ed: We can only hope

Seeker: Here’s how magic mushrooms probably became psychedelic

Quillette: The case for sustainable meat Ed: Personally ambivalent about an entirely plant-based diet, but I understand the moral dilemma present in the consumption of an animal that I couldn’t bring myself to kill. But is my lack of hesitation to kill a plant for consumption due to the fact that its anguish and pain isn’t communicable to me in terms that I understand at an emotional level the way a dog, cat, or cow’s is?  Veggies are a cleaner, more silent kill, but is it not the snuffing out of a life nonetheless? I’ve never given the questions much consideration, mainly because I believe the problem of humans slaughtering and enslaving other humans takes precedence, but the pursuit of humane living is noble, granted that it is done with honest intentions, rather than shallow virtue-signalling.

Aeon: Dungeons and Dragons, no chess and Go: Why AI needs roleplay

The Federalist: How U.S. foreign intervention created our domestic Surveillance State

Variety: Facebook admits to scanning private messages, releases privacy policy updates

BoingBoing: Zuckerberg: Facebook will not stop spying on Americans to comply with EU privacy law

The Hill: The great data robbery

The Guardian: We work for Google. Our employer shouldn’t be in the business of war.

Newsweek: Is the government spying on you? Why ‘Stingray’ tech is so controversial

Reason: Court to cops: Shoot first, think later

Invaluable point: National Review: Shouldn’t police at home exhibit at least as much discipline as soldiers at war?

New York Times: “All it takes is one mistake”: Worries over plan to send National Guard to border

Reason: Hey, Beltway denizens: Spies are tracking your phones, so maybe don’t ruin encryption: “This push to force access into phones comes at odds with the cybersecurity needs of everyone in D.C. who works in politics. You’d think their own sense of self-preservation would put a damper on these efforts, but no.

In fact, the Associated Press notes that the feds don’t seem that interested even in doing something about the cell tower simulators being operated in their own backyard by people or governments unknown. Why? Because “there was no political will to tackle the issue against opposition from the intelligence community and local police forces that were using the devices ‘willy-nilly.'”

That’s the encryption fight in a nutshell. Cops and spies don’t care about your data security if it makes it harder for them to access whatever they want. And that position seems implacable, even if it increases the likelihood that Americans will become victims of criminal hacking.”

From chapter 6 of his invaluable, and under-read, treatise, The Constitution of Liberty: 

“It is neither because it assumes that people are in fact equal nor because it attempts to make them equal that the argument for liberty demands that government treat them equally. This argument not only recognizes that individuals are very different but in a great measure rests on that assumption. It insists that these individual differences provide no justification for government to treat them differently. And it objects to the differences in treatment by the state that would be necessary if persons who are in fact very different were to be assured equal positions in life.”

The protection of the individual sphere of voluntary interaction is the chief duty of government, anything more violates that principle for the sake of expediency.

Hat-tip to the person rereading Hayek with me, resulting in the the rediscovery of hidden gems like the one above.

Chicago Tribune: DHS detects possible cellphone surveillance in Washington DC and doesn’t know who’s doing it

Axios: Microsoft and DOJ say Supreme Court privacy case is pointless

Army Times: Some Wisconsin police are returning military vehicles

USA Today: After the FBI’s Pulse nightclub failure, why should we trust James Comey anymore?

Motherboard: Which tech giant will build a revenge porn database?

LA Times: Serving in the military doesn’t make you special

The Intercept: How John Bolton wants to destroy the Constitution to attack North Korea

National Review: Oklahoma’s education disaster

FEE: EPA’s lack of transparency is a breeding ground for junk science

Sciencemag: Viking seafarers may have navigated with legendary crystals

Wall Street Journal: Artificial intelligence could soon enhance real-time police surveillance

WSWS: Palantir Technologies: A “CIA-backed start-up”

Gotta get your story straight Techdirt: Attorney general says Texas cops can view all the camera footage they want before being questioned

Volokh: Has the “Libertarian Moment” passed?

The Federalist: Why giant high schools just can’t help messed-up kids

High Times: The 6 most ridiculous anti-weed PSAs

Motherboard: Watch this robot bat fly into your nightmares

TechRadar: Amazon Echo and Google Home patents show the power they have to compromise your privacy

Axios: What your smart devices are listening for

Motherboard: Mass surveillance memes show our collective anxiety over government spying

The Verge: Badly implemented AI could “jeopardize democracy”, says French President Macron

ACLU: 8 questions members of Congress should ask Mark Zuckerberg

Reason: The spending bill brings us closer to national bankruptcy

The Federalist: What I saw at a college administrators’ conference will make you laugh and cry

FEE: The ongoing implosion of Venezuelan socialism

Activist Post: Study links glyphosate herbicide to shorter pregnancies

NPR: Is humanity unusual in the cosmos?

RealClearScience: Why prime numbers fascinate mathematicians

CNET: Cloudfare’s 1.1.1.1.: The new privacy tool that would speed up your internet, too

Business Insider: US seeks end to Supreme Court privacy battle with Microsoft on overseas data

Ars Technica: Trump admin wants to track 14 million U.S. visitors’ social media history

The Times: Privacy fears as Scottish police use spy tools to break into mobile phones

Techdirt: French government looking to copy Germany’s disastrous anti-hate speech laws

TechCrunch: DARPA wants new ideas for autonomous drone swarms

Quartz: Musk and Zuckerberg are fighting over whether we rule technology…or it rules us

ProPublica: John Bolton skewed intelligence, say people who worked for him

Antiwar.com: If John Bolton is right, then Pearl Harbor was perfectly legal

Alternet: Weapons for anyone: Donald Trump and the art of the arms deal

BoingBoing: Watch countless American news anchors mindlessly “report” the same script

Washington Post: Trump may not intend  to start a war, but he sure could bumble into one

The Hill: CNN lost its way in struggle to find an audience

Gizmodo: The horrific April Fools’ pranks of the 19th century

Science News: The science behind cancer warnings on coffee is murky at best

From Garet Garret’s essential essay, The Rise of Empire:

“We have crossed the boundary that lies between Republic and Empire. If you ask when, the answer is that you cannot make a single stroke between day and night; the precise moment does not matter. There was no painted sign to say: “You now are entering Imperium.” 

Yet it was a very old road and the voice of history was saying: “Whether you know it or not, the act of crossing may be irreversible.” And now, not far ahead, is a sign that reads: “No U-turns.” 

If you say there were no frightening omens, that is true. The political foundations did not quake, the graves of the fathers did not fly open, the Constitution did not tear itself up. If you say people did not will it, that also is true. But if you say therefore it has not happened, then you have been so long bemused by words that your mind does not believe what the eye can see, even as in the jungle the terrified primitive, on meeting the lion, importunes magic by saying to himself, “He is not there.” 

That a republic may vanish is an elementary school book fact.”

From H.L. Mencken’s essay, The Politician:

“AFTER damning politicians up hill and down dale for many years, as rogues and vagabonds, frauds and scoundrels, I sometimes suspect that, like everyone else, I often expect too much of them. Though faith and confidence are surely more or less foreign to my nature, I not infrequently find myself looking to them to be able, diligent, candid, and even honest. Plainly enough, that is too large an order, as anyone must realize who reflects upon the manner in which they reach public office. They seldom if ever get there by merit alone, at least in democratic states. Sometimes, to be sure, it happens, but only by a kind of miracle. They are chosen normally for quite different reasons, the chief of which is simply their power to impress and enchant the intellectually underprivileged. It is a talent like any other, and when it is exercised by a radio crooner, a movie actor or a bishop, it even takes on a certain austere and sorry respectability. But it is obviously not identical with a capacity for the intricate problems of statecraft.

Those problems demand for their solution—when they are soluble at all, which is not often—a high degree of technical proficiency, and with it there should go an adamantine kind of integrity, for the temptations of a public official are almost as cruel as those of a glamor girl or a dipsomaniac. But we train a man for facing them, not by locking him up in a monastery and stuffing him with wisdom and virtue, but by turning him loose on the stump. If he is a smart and enterprising fellow, which he usually is, he quickly discovers there that hooey pleases the boobs a great deal more than sense. Indeed, he finds that sense really disquiets and alarms them—that it makes them, at best, intolerably uncomfortable, just as a tight collar makes them uncomfortable, or a speck of dust in the eye, or the thought of Hell. The truth, to the overwhelming majority of mankind, is indistinguishable from a headache. After trying a few shots of it on his customers, the larval statesman concludes sadly that it must hurt them, and after that he taps a more humane keg, and in a little while the whole audience is singing “Glory, glory, hallelujah,” and when the returns come in the candidate is on his way to the White House.”