The number of clicks that this blog receives immediately upon publishing a post continues to amaze me. It’s gone up steadily over the past few weeks, as has the daily readership.  This is very flattering, but also makes me feel a bit guilty, as I haven’t been as consistent as I would like in posting. This will change.  To those who’ve signed up for Republic Reborn updates via email, I greatly appreciate it. To be honest I didn’t realize that was a thing, but now that I look at the home page more closely, yep, there it is.

Now. This blog exists purely to advance the ideal of liberty in a manner that’s both philosophical and practical, for the explicit purpose of realizing liberty within our lifetimes, and that of our children.  I for one would feel ashamed delivering my children into the maw a such a corrupt, debt-ridden monster, as currently holds power over our lives and paychecks, without some kind of protest. I do not accept that I exist for the sake of the State, I do not accept that endless war, total surveillance, and the rapid march into a prison society is my children’s fate.  Government, if it is to exist at all, exists to serve and protect my liberty.  Ours no longer does, and has forfeited any legitimacy remaining to it.  So change must happen, and that can only happen when we resolve to lend our one small voice to others, and refuse to believe that the battle for liberty is hopeless.

It is possible to successfully oppose an authoritarian government, and no more perfect example can be pointed to than in the recent unseating of the authoritarian state senator Ervin Yen from Oklahoma’s District 40 by a highly organized and targeted campaign led by Liza Greve and her activist group, Oklahomans for Vaccine and Health Choice.  To put it simply, Greve and her inspired, relentless group of ‘Mama Bears’ formed like Voltron in Yen’s district, and, with a rare relentlessness, unceremoniously booted him from said district and out of the lives of Oklahomans, defeating virtually the entire Medical Establishment that had backed Yen’s variety of medical tyranny.

The passage of State Question 788, legalizing medical marijuana, was also a right hook to the entire Political Establishment by the people who’ve paid the bills and borne the brunt of every failed social program, an establishment which has a major financial and power stake in the continued prohibition of marijuana.

We stand for liberty.  We will not be satisfied with a mere defense of current liberties; we will actively work to remove government chains from all other, long-lost, liberties.  The chains will then be placed back on government, more securely this time.  We stand for nothing less than the expansion of choice to every corner of voluntary human conduct.  We seek to give our children a world with greater liberty, not less. Tyranny, war, the diminishment of choice in every aspect of life, a total, all-encompassing Surveillance State that monitors and catalogues our every movement, is only inevitable if we believe it to be so.

We are the shield between future generations and the State. We will not continue to have our rights trampled, our wallets looted, our money debased, while the State seeks to replace us as the parent to our children. That is clearly what is at stake, and should be seen as our primary duty. We must put our hand on the plow and not look back.

Sooner Politics: Final draft of Oklahoma medical marijuana rules

Also Sooner Politics: The attempted control of cannabis medicine markets

Huffington Post: Latest ICE data details increasingly indiscriminate arrests

Cato: Why is the NSA deleting call records?

Libertarian Institute: Why no outrage over US killing of children?

National Review: Why should a single federal judge be able to make law for the entire country?

The Intercept: MSNBC does not merely permit fabrications against Democratic Party critics. It encourages and rewards them.

FEE: The Western world’s most depressing chart

TAC: The strange decline of H.L. Mencken

Zero Hedge: US declassifies 100s of nuclear test videos to YouTube

Nextgov: MIT’s new cheetah robot navigates while ‘blind’

The Independent: Why psychedelics could be the new class of antidepressant

High Times: Oklahoma public school plans to increase random drug tests for students

Reason: Miami cops forced to return almost $20,000 in cash to stripper. They also had to pay her legal bills.

Huffington Post: After promises of ‘transparency’, Pentagon under scrutiny for troop number blackouts

National Review: Against packing the courts

Cato: Why so many refugees from Central America?

The Guardian: Thanks to Amazon, the government will now be able to track your face

Electronic Frontier Foundation: EFF to Illinois Supreme Court: Protect biometric privacy

Tom’s Hardware: Civil rights groups fight to keep Illinois’ biometric privacy law

Washington Examiner: Conservatives, civil libertarians pan Supreme Court finalist Brett Kavanaugh’s ‘troubling’ NSA ruling

Volokh Conspiracy: When does a Carpenter search start…and when does it stop?

Common Dreams: Americans deserve privacy protection from Big Data

Fortune: DNA tests of separated children raise privacy concerns Ed: It was extremely reckless for authorities to separate parents from children too young to identify their mother and father. But it’s a great way to fabricate a justification for biometric data collection.

The Hill: Memos detail FBI’s ‘hurry the F up pressure’ to probe Trump campaign

Techdirt: Malaysian government decides to dump its terrible anti-fake news law

The Spec: US Border Patrol stopping and boarding Canadian fishing boats

Truthdig: The media needs to radically change the way it covers ‘foiled terror plots’

The Week: Scott Pruitt was the conservative caricature of a liberal bureaucrat Ed: Did we Oklahomans not notice his fussy elitism because we’re just used to it here? There seems to be a case for it, as Pruitt’s behavior appears to have flown under the radar until he went to Washington.  So are Oklahoma politicians more corrupt than even those in DC?

New York Times: Making American unemployed again

FEE: Socialism isn’t built on compassion. It’s built on dehumanizing others.

OKCFriday: Ervin Yen cites stance on pot and immunizations for primary loss

The Independent: Majority of doctors who oversee FDA drug approval receive payments from companies they monitor, report shows

And more: MedicalXpress: What Big Pharma pays your doctor

The Guardian: Goodbye to Scott Pruitt, the worst EPA administrator of all time

The Verge: London police chief ‘completely comfortable’ using facial recognition with 98 percent false positive rate

Motherboard: Leaked emails show cops trying to hide emails about phone-hacking tools

Reason: School strip-searches 22 sixth-grade girls because a cop thought they were hiding $50 in their underwear

Also Reason: Facebook algorithm flags, removes Declaration of Independence text as hate speech

Techdirt: Police chief tries to blame newspaper shooting on the loss of social media monitoring tool, but it doesn’t add up

Activist Post: Mainstream media admits FBI groomed terrorist for 4th of July attack, gave him supplies

The American Conservative: Where the Right when wrong on criminal justice

The Intercept: An American century of brutal overseas conquest began at Guantanamo Bay

UNZ: Feeding the monster: Washington’s spinelessness enables Israeli brutality : “A recent story illustrates just how horrible the Israelis can be without any pushback whatsoever coming from Washington objecting to their behavior. As the United States is the only force that can in any way compel Israel to come to its senses and chooses not to do so, that makes U.S. policymakers and by extension the American people complicit in Israel’s crimes.

The particularly horrible recent account that I am referring to describes how fanatical Jewish settlers burned alive a Palestinian family on the West Bank, including a baby, and then celebrated the deaths while taunting the victims’ surviving family when they subsequently appeared in court. The story was covered in Israel and Europe but insofar as I could determine did not appear in any detail in the U.S. mainstream media.

Israeli Jewish settlers carried out their shameful deed outside a court in the city of Lod, chanting “’Ali was burned, where is Ali? There is no Ali. Ali is burned. On the fire. Ali is on the grill!” referring to the 18-month old baby Ali Dawabsheh, who was burnt alive in 2015 by Jewish settlers hurling Molotov cocktails into a house in the West Bank town of Duma. Ali’s mother Riham and father Saad also died of their burns and were included in the chanting “Where is Ali? Where is Riham? Where is Saad? It’s too bad Ahmed didn’t burn as well.” Five year-old Ahmed, who alone survived the attack with severe burns, will have scars for the rest of his life.”

Boing Boing: Church cages Jesus, Mary, and Joseph to protest ICE immigrant abuse. Ed: Important to protest government abuse of children, but where are all these people when children die from our government’s endless foreign wars? What about the thousands of children starving to death in Yemen? I understand the sentiment, but too many people act like this is the first, or worst, crime against children by our government. It’s not even close.

Reason: Legal or illegal, fireworks are more available than ever

Also Reason: L.A. mayor’s warning about the dangers of fireworks blows up in his face

Techdirt: Cops are telling paramedics to inject arrestees with ketamine. Worse, EMS crews are actually doing it.

RYAN MCMAKEN: The fact that you can vote doesn’t make government abuse OK

The American Conservative: Selective moral outrage cheapens authentic protest

High Times: The industries that oppose marijuana legalization

First, from Hayek:

“We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage. What we lack is a liberal Utopia, a programme which seems neither a mere defence of things as they are nor a diluted kind of socialism, but a truly liberal radicalism which does not spare the susceptibilities of the mighty (including the trade unions), which is not too severely practical and which does not confine itself to what appears today as politically possible…Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark. But if we can regain that belief in power of ideas which was the mark of liberalism at its best, the battle is not lost.”

Then Mises, from his book, Socialism:

“Everyone carries a part of society on his shoulders; no one is relieved of his share of responsibility by others. And no one can find a safe way out for himself if society is sweeping toward destruction. Therefore, everyone, in his own interests, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle. None can stand aside with unconcern; the interest of everyone hangs on the result. Whether he chooses or not, every man is drawn into the great historical struggle, the decisive battle into which our epoch has plunged us.”

And the last is from Ron Paul, and I’ll just let him do the talking:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWJ34YANTYU

The quote from Paul, “let it not be said that we did nothing”, struck a chord with me and many of his followers when he first uttered it on the House floor. It’s important because it defies the defeatism that is rife in some libertarian circles. Some won’t get up and do anything unless they believe there’s a fair chance of success, and when the prospects for liberty appear dim, these types seem to ensure a self-fulfilling prophecy by refusing to engage in any activism at all on the grounds of, “what is there even to do? What will my single voice accomplish?” They fail to see that a defense of liberty, a refusal to let our silence be misinterpreted as consent to government crimes, is first and foremost a matter of principle. I object to war, prohibition, and a descent into tyranny because it is wrong, and I lend my small voice on principle, whether or not anyone is listening should be of secondary importance. Seeking out those who share my beliefs should be a next small step, followed by more small steps, always made on principle.  Ron Paul himself has shown what is possible for one person to achieve when he follows his convictions in a systematic, strategic manner. Virtually all the victories for liberty were accomplished by small groups who refused to surrender to the fatalism of, “what can little old me do?” The recent legalization of medical marijuana and ousting of authoritarian Senator Ervin Yen in Oklahoma proves that, well, you can do a lot, if you apply yourself.

But if liberty does whither in some national bout of State worship or nuclear exchange, let it not be said that we did nothing.

The Verge: Google tries to calm controversy over app developers having access to your Gmail

Truthdig: How much all-seeing AI surveillance is too much?

Reason: Ignore the salaciousness of the Ali Watkins affair. The real story is feds spying on a New York Times reporter.

The American Conservative: Another Saudi coalition wedding massacre in Yemen

Mises: Why the Supreme Court does what the Pentagon wants

Activist Post: Police union calls for banning of high school books because they mention police brutality

Military Times: Immigrant kids could outnumber troops 4-1 at Texas Air Force base

Mint Press News: Amazon’s fusion with the State shows neoliberalism’s drift into neofascism Ed: Yes it’s bad, but is it really a surprise? By all means, be outraged. But surprised?

FEE: What if we treated public schools as monopolies?

Scott Horton Show: The Founding Fathers never intended a secret police

Talking Drugs: As the US spent $8 billion on the Afghanistan drug war, opium production soared by 164%

Scenes from the psychedelic renaissance: OZY: Do magic mushrooms work better than Prozac? She aims to find out.

NewsOn6: Doctor behind Tulsa medical marijuana clinic speaks about his practice

Tulsa World: Medical marijuana: From policy setting to cultivation to testing and transportation, many months will pass before Oklahomans can buy it

The Independent: Why Lush was right to take aim at the undercover policing scandal

GEORGE WILL: The Supreme Court brings privacy into the 21st century

FEE: Actually, you can fight city hall, even on surveillance issues

Techdirt: Researchers reveal details of the sneaky form of surveillance known as printer tracking dots, develop free software to defeat it

Activist Post: Court rules school can use electric shock as punishment for special needs students

Electronic Intifada: Israel lobby seeks to erase occupation from Virginia schoolbooks

JAMES BOVARD: Another ‘state of democracy’ report ignores real cause of plummeting trust

The Federalist: Mexico’s new leftist president is not a threat, but the collapse of Mexico is

TomDispatch: Weaponized Keynesianism in Washington

The Intercept: Poland’s new surveillance law targets personal data of environmental activists, threatening UN climate talks Ed: Protecting the rights of political activists, regardless of affiliation, should be paramount to advocates for liberty. The laws used against advocates of a cause we dislike will one day be used against advocates of causes we champion.

Change is tough. Societal change, when you have firm views about how society should look, views that have spent decades burrowing ever deeper into your psyche, becomes almost unendurable for some. Hence the use of government as a bludgeon against such forces of change. But change, when it emerges in a spontaneous fashion from the collective forces of voluntary interaction, are beneficial on a scale that we won’t be able to comprehend until a generation or two later.  And the very attempt stop the change is like attempting to stop a tsunami. Society itself breaks apart against the rocky shores of comprehensive social crusades as the War on Drugs. Societal change, or increases in liberty, are resisted by those whose wallets will be affected.  The recent specter of a plant becoming less prohibited in my home state unleashed a volley of attacks that ultimately failed.  An entire political establishment aligned against it, because they knew the implications of letting this small liberty intrude on their prohibitionist party. Probably the largest, most profitable, and most entrenched industry, pharmaceutical, will come crumbling down within a decade due the twin awakenings to marijuana and psychedelics. But I digress.

George Shackle, the only writer I’ve managed, painstakingly, to acquire first editions of every book written, said that “economics isn’t a science, and that we ought not to call it a science”. He posited that social order is one of sudden, kaleidic change, and that professional economists should cease pretending to say anything meaningful about static states or equilibrium in regard to the workings of the economy.  Something about Shackle’s whimsical, sphinxlike style of writing is appealing to me (“we are ignorant of what it is we do not know even though we know more than we can ever say”, for instance), but societal change really is kaleidic, and it is best to stay out of its way.  A spontaneous order would rather die than be controlled, and no better example of that has been provided by all the attempts at totalitarian socialism, most recently Venezuela, where the citizens have resorted to robbing the local zoos for food, robbing and murdering each other, and generally ripping society apart in an entirely predictable manner.

So it looks like there are two certainties in regards to the outcome of social policies: if voluntarism is protected as an absolute principal, society will always move towards a better state of affairs even if we don’t know what that will look like, while socialism, strictly enforced, will lead to a fracturing of society, all the invisible social bonds that had been taken for granted will be severed. The Benthamite ‘state of nature’ follows soon thereafter.

I’d say I write posts like this to drive home the point that it is impossible to control society, the change is inescapable.  I’m talking about market and cultural change that are the result of the spontaneous forces that arise from the plans and voluntary actions and choices of millions of people making billions of decisions and calculations on a daily basis.  It’s our duty to prevent the government, or some coalition of offended persons from targeting this type of spontaneous change.  Defenders of liberty are in every sense defenders of the spontaneous forces of society.  Good luck fitting that into a party platform.