Uncategorized – Page 451 – REPUBLIC REBORN

This kind of overt corruption is what prison is actually for: NewsOK: Pharmacy board head allegedly offered official a job to sway marijuana rules Ed: What is amusing about all of this is that Julie Ezell, the former Health Department attorney accused of sending threatening messages to herself, will probably flush out all the offending players in this charade. Let’s release a few thousand non-violent offenders and make room for these idiots.

Oh yes: KTUL: Oklahoma prosecutor seeks expanded probe over text messages

KOCO: Oklahoma legislative leaders form 13-member marijuana panel

Activist Post: Thousands of scientists sign pledge against developing lethal A.I.

National Review: The Ninth Circuit protects gun rights and stops confiscation

The Federalist: No, Montenegro is not essential to U.S. national security interests

Al Jazeera: UK using child spies in police operations

CFR: The rise of China’s Security-Industrial Complex

Gizmodo: Hack can turn robotic vacuum into creepy rolling surveillance machine

Biometric Update: UK mayor contemplates using facial recognition tech to catch litterbugs

Financial Times: How police forces use data to assess risks and predict crime

The Intercept: Chaos prevails in immigrant detention centers, with children under 5 still separated from parents

Reuters: Palestinians in Jerusalem demolish own homes rather than see Israeli settlers move in

WSWS: Israeli parliament passes apartheid-style ‘Nation-State’ law

Fox: Pentagon makes massive AI push for tanks, ships, weapons, drones, and networks

FEE: What the origin of money teaches us about spontaneous order

07/19/18 Overnight Links

Posted on July 18, 2018July 19, 2018 by S. Smith

Marijuana.com: Fake emails, felony charges, and Attorney General’s intervention: A dramatic 48 hours in Oklahoma marijuana policymaking

KFOR: Attorney general advises health board to convene special meeting to amend medical marijuana rules

ABC Tulsa: Gov. Fallin says Board of Health should rescind medical marijuana rules

Civilized: Native American tribes won’t allow medical marijuana in Oklahoma

High Times: Cannabis illicit market shrinking, new DEA, Homeland Security numbers suggest

New York Post: Marijuana may help fight cancer

Check out the video in the article: The Federalist: Sacha Baron Cohen tried to trick this gun store owner, who wasn’t having any of it

Techdirt: ‘Smart’ TVs remain the poster child for dismal privacy, transparency and security standards

Reason: When code is speech, tech like 3D-printed guns sees greater protection from censorship

National Review: Brett Kavanaugh and the Supreme Court’s Fourth Amendment mess

Ars Technica: Judge slams FBI for improper cellphone search, Stingray use

The Week: Can blockchain fix America’s voting system?

NOLA: Study finds a brain on psychedelic trip looks as active as a growing baby’s: report

07/18/18 Overnight Links

Posted on July 18, 2018July 18, 2018 by S. Smith

Good god: NewsOK: Top attorney for Health Department who resigned last Friday charged with felony after OSBI determines she sent threats to herself. Ed: She sent herself death threats and then claimed they came from disgruntled pro-788 activists. My question is why would someone in her position in power, knowing her crime would be discovered, engage in this behavior?

KOCO: Official says procedure could keep recreational marijuana off November ballot

Tulsa World: 10 things medical marijuana patients would not be allowed to do under SQ 788

The American Conservative: Cronyism in action: Government’s cozy ties to Big Tech and Big War

WIRED: Schools can now get facial recognition tech for free. Should they?

ZDnet: Tech giants, civil liberties coalition urge Congress to pass email privacy law

EFF: Undermining mobile phone users’ privacy won’t make us safer

Washington Post: How your data is used by the police, and where it goes wrong

Washington Times: “Buy America”: U.S. arms sales increase despite Trump’s tough talk on NATO, trade

Mises: The EU’s new data protection rules are already hurting Europeans

The Hill: Children are one of the War on Drugs’ casualties

The Intercept: Brett Kavanaugh repeatedly ruled in favor of the National Security State, most recently for the CIA, and against me

The Federalist: Communists brutally murdered Russia’s last royal family 100 years ago today

The American Conservative: The war on Yemen’s invisible victims

Charlotte Observer: What data on 20 million traffic stops can tell you about ‘driving while black’

FEE: The second Social Security crisis nobody is talking about

Oh no: Massive: Pulling all-nighters could permanently damage your brain

Overnight Hayek and Nock

Posted on July 18, 2018 by S. Smith

In light of the revelation that the Oklahoma Department of Health’s attorney, Julie Ezell, sent herself fake threats of harm via email and then claiming it came from the pro-788 activist camp, I thought it would be suitable to revisit a few passages from a few of my favorite writers, Friedrich Hayek and Albert Jay Nock. First, Hayek, from Chapter 10 of his The Road to Serfdom, Why the Worst Get on Top:

“There are strong reasons for believing that what to us appear the worst features of the existing totalitarian systems are not accidental byproducts, but phenomena which totalitarianism is certain sooner or later to produce. Just as the democratic statesman who sets out to plan economic life will soon be confronted with the alternative of either assuming dictatorial powers or abandoning his plans, so the totalitarian dictator would soon have to choose between disregard of ordinary morals and failure. It is for this reason that the unscrupulous and uninhibited are likely to be more successful in a society tending towards totalitarianism. Who does not see this has not yet grasped the full width of the gulf which separates totalitarianism from a liberal regime, the utter difference between the whole moral atmosphere under collectivism and the essentially individualist Western civilization.”

And now, Nock, from his wonderful essay, Prohibition and Civilization:

“The advocates of prohibition ought to get a clear grasp of the fundamental objection to their theory, and meet it with something more substantial than feeble talk about the influence of “the liquor interests.” Our objection is to Puritanism, with its false social theory taking shape in a civilization that, however well-ordered and economically prosperous, is hideous and suffocating. One can at least speak for oneself: I am an absolute teetotaler, and it would make no difference to me if there were never another drop of liquor in the world; and yet to live under any regime of prohibition that I have so far had opportunity to observe would seem to me an appalling calamity. The ideals and instruments of Puritanism are simply unworthy of a free people, and, being unworthy, are soon found intolerable. Its hatreds, fanaticisms, inaccessibility to ideas; its inflamed and cancerous interest in the personal conduct of others; its hysterical disregard of personal rights; its pure faith in force, and above all, its tyrannical imposition of its own Kultur: these characterize and animate a civilization that the general experience of mankind at once condemns as impossible, and as hateful as it is impossible.”

Hayek on the economic creationism of socialist theory

Posted on July 17, 2018July 17, 2018 by S. Smith

From Chapter 9, ‘Social’ or distributive justice, of his profound Law, Legislation, and Liberty:

“As primitive thinking usually does when first noticing some regular processes, the results of the spontaneous ordering of the market were interpreted as if some thinking being deliberately directed them, or as if the particular benefits or harm different persons derived from them were determined by deliberate acts of will, and could therefore be guided by moral rules. This conception of ‘social’ justice is thus a direct consequence of that anthropomorphism or personification by which naive thinking tries to account for all self-ordering processes. It is a sign of the immaturity of our minds that we have not yet outgrown these primitive concepts and still demand from an impersonal process which brings about a greater satisfaction of human desires than any deliberate human organization could achieve, that it conform to the moral precepts men have evolved for the guidance of their individual actions.”

I’ve noticed a strange tendency among those that scoff at adherents of an intelligent design theory of life and the universe simultaneously, and ironically, adhere to an identical theory in the economic realm, in the sense that the processes of the economy have been created by some single entity, and can be successfully controlled and directed by an all-powerful entity, almost always the government. 20th century communism proclaimed atheism, despite worshiping an all-powerful State and bestowing upon it unlimited power to interfere in the market, with hideous consequences.