History.com: The Christmas Truce of 1914

EFF: Medical privacy under attack: 2017 in review

The Intercept: The election fraud in Honduras follows decades of corruption funded by the U.S. war on drugs

Business Standard: 2017 was a banner year for arms industry

Macleans: 2018 will be the year of cyberwarfare

Zero Hedge: The Strangelovian Russia-gate myth

NPR: The foster care system is flooded with children of the opioid epidemic

The Independent: In an age of facial recognition technology and lip-reading CCTV cameras, we need to consider the concept of digital consent

The Week: The most respectable conspiracy theory in Washington

Inverse: The 25 biggest scientific breakthroughs of 2017

Yahoo News UK: Santa and magic mushrooms: Was the Christmas icon derived from trippy fungi?

Inarguably the most iconic essay ever penned by Albert Jay Nock is Isaiah’s Job, written in 1936, when Nock himself was 66 years old.  In this essay he gifted the unknown and unknowable collection of individuals who are naturally drawn to the philosophy of liberty with a name: the Remnant.

“The Remnant are those who by force of intellect are able to apprehend these principles, and by force of character are able, at least measurably, to cleave to them. The masses are those who are unable to do either.”

It’s considered a classic among libertarian circles, yet I know very few libertarian activists who have read it.  Which is a shame, because it effectively stiffens resolve where it might otherwise wane, when discouragement and a general going against the current becomes too much at times.  It’s message fortifies in a way that few other essays do.  Yes, there are people who are listening to you, taking your message to heart, even if they don’t acknowledge themselves.  They are drawn to the ideal of a free society, usually without knowing why.  Liberty glints and gleams like stainless steel in their dreams, and they look to you for guidance, for more.  And Nock’s entire point is that those who advocate for liberty should never dilute the message for the sake of mass acceptance.  Those with the force of character will listen, and then will rebuild society upon that foundation.  The masses eat up the popular messages of the day, and forget them just as quickly.  But there are those who move silently among us that are drawn to the philosophy of liberty like a compass arrow drawn to true north.  For their sake, Nock says, stay true to your message.

“The other certainty which the prophet of the Remnant may always have is that the Remnant will find him. He may rely on that with absolute assurance. They will find him without his doing anything about it; in fact, if he tries to do anything about it, he is pretty sure to put them off. He does not need to advertise for them nor resort to any schemes of publicity to get their attention. If he is a preacher or a public speaker, for example, he may be quite indifferent to going on show at receptions, getting his picture printed in the newspapers, or furnishing autobiographical material for publication on the side of “human interest.” If a writer, he need not make a point of attending any pink teas, autographing books at wholesale, nor entering into any specious freemasonry with reviewers. All this and much more of the same order lies in the regular and necessary routine laid down for the prophet of the masses; it is, and must be, part of the great general technique of getting the mass man’s ear — or as our vigorous and excellent publicist, Mr. H.L. Mencken, puts it, the technique of boob bumping. The prophet of the Remnant is not bound to this technique. He may be quite sure that the Remnant will make their own way to him without any adventitious aids; and not only so, but if they find him employing any such aids, as I said, it is ten to one that they will smell a rat in them and will sheer off.”

I’m fairly certain that this post will have only done Nock justice if it leads to one person clicking the link and reading the essay in its entirety.  I read it for the first time merely by chance six years ago, in the basement of a college library while waiting for what would later be known as the 2011 “super outbreak” storm to pass over.  Since then, I’ve read it probably ten times, and I find different insights that I hadn’t noticed before.  Nock’s writing has this effect.

EFF: Beating back the rise of law enforcement’s digital surveillance of protestors

Center for Research on Globalization: Drug deaths drive down US life expectancy for second straight year

Another take on the crisis from the Chicago Tribune: The epidemic that’s shortening American lives

Daily Star: Artificial intelligence is now bombing ISIS

Digital Trends: Biometric scans at airports may not be legal: report

CBS News: What was the Pentagon’s secret UFO program looking for?

IB Times: Big Brother is watching you in China, every minute, every second, everywhere

Daily Beast: This drone will change emergency medical treatment

Santa Fe New Mexican: Drug use explodes in Mexico as more narcotics stay home

Mexico News Daily: Why 2017 has been so terrible for Mexico

Huffington Post: How a secretive police squad racked up kills in Duterte’s drug war

Libertarian Institute: Anatomy of a tax cut

Mises Institute: Leonard Read on what it means to be a liberal

Ars Technica: Why does the Western US have so many odd volcanoes?

RCS: Detox tea may have killed woman

Physics Central: How fast does time dilate?

Science Daily: Why water is at its strangest at -44 Celsius

New York Times: Privacy complaints mount over phone searches at U.S. border since 2011

The Hill: Rand Paul puts hold on Trump nominee over surveillance concerns

Android Central: Ed Snowden’s Haven app turns your cellphone into a surveillance device

Techdirt: Canadian government looking to step up domestic surveillance, scale back intelligence oversight

The Intercept: How the government botched the case against Cliven Bundy

Defense One: The Pentagon’s AI is already hunting terrorists

Washington Post: Why DARPA and NASA are building robot spacecraft designed to act like service stations on orbit

EFF: Surveillance battles: 2017 in review

Daily Beast: Kids don’t have parents anymore, they have ‘sharents’

Reason: Texas cops shoot and kill 6-year old while shooting and killing woman they were chasing

Zero Hedge: Mexico suffers deadliest year ever

USA Today: At ‘pot churches’, marijuana is the sacrament

Techdirt: The spy coalition in Congress rushes through plan to keep the NSA spying on Americans

EFF: Efforts to expand NSA spying trip up

Rare: Rand Paul threatens to filibuster extension of warrantless surveillance

CNET: Snowden, privacy groups oppose new surveillance bill

Washington Examiner: The tech generation should reject mass surveillance

City Journal: Is your cell phone protected by the Constitution?

ZDNet: 2017 was a dumpster fire of privacy and security screw-ups

Sputnik: Not just about privacy: Facial recognition data must be controlled

Reason: We’re spending too much on defense

FEE: Four years on, what can Colorado teach us about legalizing weed?

The Libertarian Republic: Nurse busted stealing vials of fentanyl from hospital

The Intercept: Israel tackles existential threat posed by 16-year old Palestinian girl

Mother Jones: A brief, blood-boiling history of the opioid epidemic

BMC: Ethical questions raised by brain-computer interface

Lew Rockwell: The importance of good manners

Reason: Rebellious jurors make the world a better place

Most of us have a voice in our brain that begins chittering almost immediately when we commit to a long-desired goal, plan, task, lifestyle, etc.  The voice sounds calm and rational, like a lawyer or psychiatrist, and explains either the high probability for miserable failure, a safe path to alternative-yet-lesser goals, or gives us a complex plan that leads us in one big circle back to square one, wasting precious years.  The volume of the voice, I believe is in inverse proportion to the level of self-esteem one has, as is how often we give that voice the time of day.  But I think we all do it.  Steve Pressfield dubbed this “voice” Resistance in his book, The War of Art.  We sit down to commit to a project, a goal, some long-desired yet put-off task, and the voice immediately echoes in our brain, asking us rhetorically who we think we are for attempting such a goal.  It tells us our self-worth, not an accurate estimation, but one we fear, deep down, is true.  While Pressfield’s book is the most astounding ass-kicker of a self-help book I’ve ever read, one that anyone with any goal in life at all should read, it’s not the piece of writing this post will be about.

No, the most important essay you’ll read today on such a topic is Albert Jay Nock’s, Snoring as a Fine Art, which can be read here in the compilation of his writings with the same title.  I should say beforehand that the concept is a slight variation on the aforementioned, in the sense that Nock is here is talking about how much attention we pay to another voice within us, not even a voice really, but a feeling, what most people I think mean when they say ‘listen to your gut’, as opposed to the ceaseless chatter of the dry lawyer telling you that you won’t be able to achieve what you aim for.

Nock begins his essay with an account of Napoleon’s humiliating defeat and retreat from Russia at the hands of Russian general Kutusov.  What’s strange about the ordeal is that Kutusov could have crushed Napoleon at every point, but didn’t.  Yet he predicted Napoleon’s every move until he was driven out of Russia entirely with not a drop of Russian blood spilled.   Yet Kutusov allegedly slept through most military meetings, and preferred courting women decades younger than discussing the finer points of military strategy.  Nock’s point is that he subconsciously heeded an inner voice to the exclusion of all others, including the supposed experts around him.  He did what he wanted, guided by an inner “feeling”:

“Kutusov seems to have been one of those peculiarly and
mysteriously gifted persons of whom one can say only, as
we so often do say in our common speech, that they “had
something.” Such people appear in history all the way from
Balaam the son of Beor down to contemporary examples
which I shall presently cite; there are more of them, perhaps,
than one would think. They “have something,” but nobody
knows what it is or how they got it; and investigation of it
is always distinctly unrewarding. In the late J. A. Mitchell’s
story called Amos Judd—one of those sweet and unpretentious
little narratives of the last century which I suppose no
one nowadays could be hired to read—Deacon White says,
“There’s something between Amos and the Almighty that
the rest of us ain’t into”; and that is about as far as scientific
inquiry into these matters has ever carried us, or probably
ever will…

…I wish to remark that the gift (I call it a gift
only for convenience, to save words) which we are discussing
is not only dissociated from intellect, but also from conventional
morals. Certain Old Testament characters who
unquestionably had it, and on occasion let it put itself to
good use, were nevertheless what by our conventional ethical
standards we would call pretty tough citizens; our old
friend Balaam, for instance, and Elisha. It has been said, and
I believe it is accepted in some quarters—of course there is
no knowing—that Joan of Arc was not in all respects a
model of sound peasant character; but granting it be so, she
still most conspicuously “had the goods.””

T.E. Lawrence, the only historical figure I’ve ever had an incomprehensible obsession with, is another that comes to mind.  Why did a 5’5″, 100-lb, 27-year old military intelligence officer suddenly decide to disregard his official duties in order to lead a band of Arabs across a previously-thought un-crossable section of desert to capture a military outpost, leading to the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire? More importantly, what did Arab Kind Feisal and the rest of the Arabs see in Lawrence that commanded such allegiance? The evidence points to someone who suddenly and whole-heartedly abandoned the ‘voice of reason’ and listened to his ‘gut’, or his ‘heart’ and led a goddamned revolt against an Empire and actually won.  I think once we give in the ‘gut’, we almost have no choice but to obey.  It’s an engine within us all, waiting for the moment when we realize it exists.  We have only then to get the hell out of its way.  It brings to mind the supposed Thoreau quote, “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation, and die with the song still inside them.”

Which brings me to another topic.  It has been a decade since the December 16th, $6.3-million money bomb for the Ron Paul campaign, the largest single amount donated to a politician in a single day. A decade. It seems simultaneously shorter and longer than that: “has it really been just ten years?”/”seems like yesterday!”  In reality it feels like a lifetime ago.  An alternate timeline.  The five years from 2007 to 2012 now feel almost mythical, a blur of religious passion that erupted like a volcano.  That volcano is now dormant.  Or dead.  I prefer to believe the former.  Mainly because I remember the eruption, I saw it seared on the faces of those who turned wholeheartedly to that inner voice, and gave themselves to the goal of liberty in our lifetime.  It failed in the short run, but a cataclysmic event of that magnitude doesn’t just die.  Are you there?  Did a decade extinguish that fire, or merely temper it? I know you, I remember you. A single decade didn’t kill that voice that compelled you to go to war for our uncompromising vision.  The disciples of liberty may be scattered to the four winds, but they’re not dead.  They believed, you believed, that “we have it in our power to begin the world again”, a Tom Paine quote thrown around a lot in those days.  You’re still there, I know you still believe it.

Witnessing firsthand the Ron Paul Revolution, playing a minuscule part in it, yet standing right next to a political wildfire that threatened to burn down the established order and cleanse the country for the rise of liberty, I saw what was possible when a collection of nobodies armed with the inner voice is pitted against a legion of dead souls in suits who work for a King’s gold.

The philosophy of liberty, for me, can only be described as a mind-quake, or a religious awakening.  From Ayn Rand, to Mises, Rothbard, Hayek, Spencer, Nock, Mencken, to Ron Paul, I was unknowingly embarking on a five-year politico-philosophical hegira.  To bring this full circle, and give the post a semblance of coherence, I believe this is due to my attempt to listen to something other than the ‘voice of reason’ or conventional wisdom, but my heart.  I also believe that my attention to that peaked three years ago, and I know those around me have witnessed my unconscious abandonment to that voice.  It’s time for a return.

Well.  That descended into something surprisingly personal.

“Fiery the Angels rose, and as they rose deep thunder roll’d, burning with the fires of Orc.”-William Blake

Pro Libertate Patriae.

Washington Post: Convicted of a marijuana crime in California? It might go away, thanks to legal pot.  Ed: I always assumed this would be an automatic order of business once a state legalized pot, basically expunging the criminal record of every single victim of pot prohibition and giving them their lives back.

Bitcoinist: EU’s Bitcoin database could make privacy a thing of the past

Financial Times: German cartel office warns Facebook over personal data collection

Related from WaPo: Facebook wants your face data–in the name of privacy, it says

The Moscow Times: Russia to grant police access to bank customers’ biometric data

Planet Biometrics: Germany mulls facial recognition at all train stations

TechRepublic: MIT’s automated machine learning works 100x faster than human data scientists

Wired UK: Curbing your data addiction will help you make better decisions

Quartz: This year the world woke up to the society-shifting power of artificial intelligence

AP: Killings of women soared in the last decade amid Mexico’s Drug War

Fortune: Facebook accused of privacy violations in France

National Law Review: Wave of Illinois biometric privacy lawsuits continues unabated

CNET: Law enforcement requests for Facebook user data up 21 percent

Nasdaq: How the EU’s new privacy law will impact Big Tech in 2018

Ars Technica: Hackers take control of security firm’s domain, steal secret data

Techdirt: Another court says compelled password production doesn’t violate the Fifth Amendment

Government Technology: Public opinion often sets privacy standards for smart city tech

Washington Post: Former navy pilot describes encounter with UFO studied by secretive Pentagon program

High Times: Study shows that people prefer legal weed over alcohol

Mother Nature Network: 7 mind-bending facts about magic mushrooms

First, I’d like to welcome all the new readers.  I appreciate the perusal and page views, as the daily volume has reached a level that is forcing me to reconsider how much time I spend writing here.  Which means I will do more.  And I will add comments once I’ve figured out how. I’ve written for other outlets, but I would like this space to become the primary home to my writing, as the original purpose for my writing at all was one thing only: to advance liberty.  The threats to a free society are myriad: the galloping advance of a sophisticated, networked system of total biometric surveillance, a technological Panopticon that would make Jeremy Bentham blush.  The National Security State, born out of the post-9/11 wave of hysteria, has become a gargantuan bureaucracy, but the hysteria no longer exists.  Yet endless war persists, and the bureaucracy needs continual exterior threats to justify its existence.  And while the drug war winds down, millions languish in US prisons, the country with the highest incarceration rate in the world, US police gun down over 1,000 citizens each year, and our government profiles and targets activist groups who attempt to effect change.  Every seemingly disparate and unconnected threat to liberty stems from the same web that reaches into every aspect of our lives.  Local police departments receive surveillance drones and bodycams, soon to be equipped with facial recognition technology that will feed into a national biometric database filled with detailed information of every citizen.  Military intervention abroad generates threats at home that provide a convenient excuse for the total surveillance bureaucracy that is consuming billions of dollars while stripping us of any semblance of privacy.

Yet there is hope.  There are stubborn pockets of resistance in the form of writers, bloggers, activists, and concerned citizens who would prefer a future not riddled with CCTV facial recognition cameras as they’re tracked like cattle everywhere they go.

Think about the dichotomy of surveillance and privacy.  Surveillance is what we conduct on things we wish to control, whether it’s plants, animals, or other possessions.  To conduct surveillance on another individual is to presume a level of ownership or control over that person.  When a government does it to its citizens, what is the implied relationship?  Who owns whom, who controls whom?

Which brings me to the title of post, “strange things happen at the one-two point”, an ancient proverb referring to Go, a deceptively simple board game developed in China several millennia ago, which means “the rules do not apply”.  I mention this quote for several reasons.  Two weeks ago, Google’s DeepMind AI mastered chess in four hours, and the news was trumpeted to the heavens.  But something far more significant occurred a few months earlier when another Google AI mastered Go by playing the game over and over for a span of 40 days.  What’s significant is the vast difference in complexity between chess and Go.  The number of potential chess games is what is referred to as the Shannon number, or 10^140, which is actually very large, but small enough for an AI to brute force learn every single outcome.  Go, on the other hand, has an outcome complexity of 10^(10^48), a number too large to learn the game by sheer brute force, which means the AI had to become creative, or, more human.  After 40 days it devised plays previously unknown to Go masters.  The underreported news story of the Go-playing AI eerily brings to mind John Connor’s words from the first Terminator: “They say it got smart, a new order of intelligence.”

Strange things happen at the one-two point.  The rules do not apply.  Technology, governments, and their citizens are reaching a point of convergence, and anything is possible

USA Today: Surveillance cams, face scans help China make thousands vanish .Ed: this is the ultimate function of total surveillance, not as a crime-fighting tool but as one of population control.

NBC News: A teen sexting case revealed how judges let police invade children’s privacy

Brinkwire: Want to live in a futuristic smart city today? Take a cruise.

ABC News: Once-secret, now-closed $22 million UFO program confirmed by Pentagon

Daily Mail: Bitcoin mining is causing electricity blackouts

National Review: The lost art of privacy

Forbes: California’s $15 minimum wage will cost the state 400,000 jobs Ed: Why does anyone still support the idea of a minimum wage in the face of the evidence?

Techdirt: Cop shuts off dashcam during drug dog sniff.  Appeals Court: This is fine.

The Guardian: Wikileaks recognized as a “media organization” by UK tribunal

Activist Post: OKC musician arrested, strip-searched, and thrown in jail for singing without a license

Townhall: Freak-out, death threats, and…neutrality?

The Federalist: No, lifting ‘Net Neutrality’ doesn’t hurt gay people. “It is unnerving to realize that the leaders of the LGBT movement seem to believe average gay people are utterly dependent on them for seemingly everything.”

ArsTechnica: More haunting declassified scans of nuclear weapons test videos released

The Intercept: J20 defendants await verdict in first test of government attempt to criminalize protest group as a whole

High Times: Is this finally the big moment for hemp?

Reason: The FBI is not your friend

Nautilus: Why your brain hates other people