DAVID FRENCH: The worst police shooting yet

The Federalist: U.K. police urge citizens to report neighbors for “offensive or insulting” speech

Vox: The TSA has a new program that could spy on you. It’s also a massive waste of money.

Reason: Classy: TSA uses 9/11 anniversary to debut new slogan

TAC: Washington quietly increases lethal weapons to Ukraine

Activist Post: Grand jury finds police were complicit in covering up massive child sex ring in Catholic church

JAMES BOVARD: Freedom frauds: Are we all terrorists, 17 years after 9/11?

New Republic: Why are drug users being charged with murder?

High Times: The anatomy of a marijuana plant

Comes from Shackle’s singular 1972 work, Epistemics and Economics: 

“If there is a fundamental conflict between the appeal to rationality and the consideration of the consequence of time as it imprisons us in actuality, the theoretician is confronted with a stark choice. He can reject rationality or time. The theory which rejects time has certain technical features, often referred to as, respectively, subjective marginalism, the market mechanism, and partial equilibrium…

…The other road consists in abandoning, not the word ‘time’, but its meaning of a forceps which grips us between the past which is unchoosable and the future which is unknowable.”

Shackle’s Orphic prose accurately captures the strangeness of our predicament. We are, in a sense, imprisoned by time. Despite that, our species moves through time and into an unknowable future and not only survives, but thrives. The strangeness stems from the fact that it shouldn’t be possible beyond the most basic of plans. Yet complex plans are carried out, economic calculations are accurately made, people are fed, clothed, housed, entertained, etc. And not in spite of the complexity of society, but because of it. The greatest attribute of our species is its ability to unwittingly generate vast cultural and social complexity as a way to solve the problems of time and ignorance.

Political Critique: A lawless zone: Surveillance technologies and the police

Techdirt: Officer who killed unarmed man now teaching officers how to go about the difficult business of being alive

Independent: US senator claims Britain’s MI6 is planning a fake chemical weapons attack in Syria

PAT BUCHANAN: Is Trump going full neocon in Syria?

Ars Technica: Mega-rich family behind opioid crisis has second, secret opioid company

Washington Post: Trump’s border wall threatens to end Texas family’s 250 years of ranching on the Rio Grande

High Times: Is Elon Musk’s government security clearance at risk from smoking pot? Personally, I’d prefer a government of potheads to the current situation.

Activist Post: Deadly fire exposes millionaire’s network of secret tunnels under Washington DC suburb

Reason: Court says school resource officers can’t arrest students just to prove a point

Also Reason: If you hate Ice Ages, thank a farmer

Truthdig: How Bill Clinton paved the way for Trump’s war on immigrants

News OK: A few Oklahoma doctors take the plunge on medical marijuana, but many wait

Ars Technica: NSA metadata program consistent with the Fourth Amendment, Kavanaugh once argued

The Verge: The Pentagon plans to spend $2 billion to put more artificial intelligence into weaponry

Gulf Today: Over 67,000 Yemenis either killed, injured, or kidnapped during past four years: Minister

FEE: Americans are leaving states with high tax rates, data show

RON PAUL: Can’t we just leave Syria alone?

The Week: Afghanistan, the endless war

The Intercept: Are New York’s free LinkNYC kiosks tracking your movements?

High Times: Hotels tap into projected $2.1 billion CBD market

Nassim Taleb on Saudi Arabia, from pages 106-107 of his book, Antifragility:

“So a place “allied” to the United States is a total monarchy, devoid of a constitution. But that is not what is morally shocking. A group of between seven and fifteen thousand members of the royal family runs the place, leading a lavish, hedonistic lifestyle in open contradiction with the purist ideas that got them there. Look at the contradiction: the stern desert tribes whose legitimacy is derived from Amish-like austerity can, thanks to a superpower, turn to hedonistic uninhibited pleasure-seeking: the king openly travels for pleasure with a retinue that fills four Jumbo jets. Quite a departure from his ancestors. The family members amassed a fortune now largely in Western safes. Without the United States, the country would have had its revolution, a regional breakup, some turmoil, then perhaps–by now–some stability. But preventing noise makes the problem worse in the long run.”

He may be stretching his analogies a bit too thin in places, generalizing them so as to apply them to a greater number of circumstances, but Taleb does point out the phenomenon of foreign aid creating political corruption in governments. A government is loyal to whoever writes the checks and delivers the guns. For a government to be somewhat accountable, both of those must come from the people they govern. It’s one reason I’ve always found the “tax the rich” policy argument strange: forcing the rich to pay the government more would serve only to more closely tie the rich to the government.

High Times: Study find marijuana use among Baby Boomer doubled in the past decade

RADLEY BALKO: “Cop of the Year” syndrome

FEE: All taxes undermine prosperity, but personal and income taxes do the most damage

Also FEE: The foreign war on drugs is failing, too

Reason: The TSA’s plastic screening trays are the dirtiest part of the airport

The Intercept: Dear anonymous Trump official, there is no redemption in your cowardly op-ed

NICK GILLESPIE: Anonymous tell-alls in the New York Times are more of a threat to the republic than Trump

DOUG BANDOW: John McCain leaves behind a hawkish void

AIER: The facts about immigration and crime

JUSTIN RAIMONDO: The hi-tech threat

Techdirt: Saudi government outlaws satire; violators to face five-year prison sentences

Astronomy.com: Saturn’s hexagon could be an enormous tower

Another from Taleb’s 2012 appropriately arrogant Antifragile, page 58-59:

“Our antifragilities have conditions. The frequency of stressors matters a bit. Humans tend to do better with acute than with chronic stressors, particularly when the former are followed by ample time for recovery, which allows the stressors to do their jobs as messengers. For instance, having an intense emotional shock from seeing a snake coming out of my keyboard or a vampire entering my room, followed by a period of soothing safety (with chamomile tea and baroque music) long enough for me to regain control of my emotions, would be beneficial for my health, provided of course that I manage to overcome the snake or vampire after an arduous, hopefully heroic fight and have a picture taken next to the dead predator. Such a stressor would be certainly better than the mild but continuous stress of a boss, mortgage, tax problems, guilt over procrastinating with one’s tax return, exam pressures, chores, emails to answer, forms to complete, daily commutes–things that make you feel trapped in life. In other words, the pressures brought about by civilization.In fact, neurobiologists show that the former type of stressor is necessary, the second harmful, for one’s health. For an idea of how harmful a low-level stressor without recovery can be, consider the so-called Chinese water torture: a drop continuously hitting the same spot on your head, never letting you recover.”

And a bonus nugget, and sentiment I can identify with, from page 63:

“If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead.”

The Week: The death of local news

Reason: Tariffs on steel, aluminum, and lumber blamed for spiking home construction prices

LA Times: In a trade war, everyone loses

Techdirt: ‘Five Eyes’ surveillance agencies say encryption is good, except when it keeps them from looking at stuff

Washington Post: That time a President deported 1 million immigrants for “stealing” American jobs

TAC: Industrial poison: The third phase of an overdose boom

The Federalist: Is a toxic public school environment behind increases in child suicides?

National Review: Mr. President, the problem is FISA, not the lack of hearings on FISA warrants

High Times: Malaysian court sentences man to death for distributing free cannabis oil

FEE: Venezuela’s nightmare is a tragedy, but not a surprise

New documentary, The Modern Surveillance State

This one from page 413 of Nassim Taleb’s highly readable 2012 book, Antifragile:

“…the more complicated the regulation, the more prone to arbitrage by insiders. This is another argument in favor of heuristics. Twenty-three hundred pages of regulation–something I can replace with Hammurabi’s Rule–will be a gold mine for former regulators. The incentive of a regulator is to have complex regulation. The insiders are the enemies of the less-is-more rule. 

…the difference between the letter and the spirit of regulation is harder to detect in a complex system. The point is technical, but complex environments with nonlinearities are easier to game than linear ones with a small number of variables. The same applies to the gap between the legal and the ethical. 

…in African countries, government officials get explicit bribes. In the United States they have the implicit, never mentioned, promise to go to work for a bank at a later date with a sinecure offering, say $5 million a year, if they are seen favorably by the industry. And the “regulations” of such activities are easily skirted.”

Taleb is describing regulatory capture, which is the main argument against government-created “regulation” of any particular industry. The officials staffing each regulatory agency are, in effect, future employees of the industries they’re currently tasked with regulating.  If a politician is in need of an off-the-books payoff, he ‘writes’ a “New York Times best seller”, and gets his money, nice and laundered. These are the ones you see in bookstores with a picture of a middle-aged man or woman, crap-eating grin on their face, entitled some variation of “Honor and Duty”.

Taleb’s book is charming, creative, arrogant, and fun to read.

Activist Post: Profit before safety: Why are legal exemption lines drawn for Big Pharma?

Claremore Daily Progress: Number of medical marijuana entrepreneurs in Oklahoma higher than expected

Military: When it comes to medical marijuana, veterans often have to improvise

Reason: Anti-pot staffers conspire to turn Trump against marijuana federalism

Ars Technica: Cheese danish shipping, warrantless GPS trackers, and a border doctrine challenge

The Blaze: Report: Google, Mastercard cut secret deal to track offline purchases

The Free Thought Project: Family outraged after cop shoots a dog that was on a leash

City Lab: Militarization of local police isn’t making anyone safer

Consortium News: The unlikely force behind US prison reform

The Intercept: Donald Trump;s former ICE chief to be honored at notorious anti-Muslim convention

Common Dreams: As Saudis say bombings of Yemeni children mere ‘mistakes’, growing calls for US to stop fueling atrocities

WSWS: The canonization of John McCain: Media, political establishment turn warmonger into a saint