If you didn’t have a reason to shop here before, now you do: Mirror UK: Fury as cosmetics giant Lush launches new campaign accusing British police of ‘spying’ and being ‘paid to lie’ It appears they’re now backing off their anti-Police State message, which is disappointing, since so few businesses have the guts to actually engage in it. The focus on the campaign appears to be a stand against undercover police work, surveillance, and blackmailing at-risk people into becoming informants, all activities that British (and American) police openly engage in.  Unfortunately, many citizens worship cops no matter what they do, and so Lush will back off the campaign for the sake of saving their business.

Well that was quick: Washington Post: Google to drop Pentagon AI contract after employee objections to the ‘business of war’

Hmm: The Intercept: Google won’t renew it’s drone AI contract, but it may still sign future military AI projects

Well: The Intercept: Leaked emails show Google expected lucrative military drone AI work to grow exponentially

Ars Technica: Homeland Security found evidence of Stingray cell phone spying near White House

National Review: It’s like the McCarthy Era, but with no Communist threat to justify it

NYT: The 1,500 ‘missing’ immigrant kids are the lucky ones

FEE: Government makes healthcare worse and more expensive

Long, but important, quote from Chapter 1 of Law, Legislation, and Liberty:

“As the conception of evolution will play a central role throughout our discussion, it is important to clear up some misunderstandings which in recent times have made students of society reluctant to employ it. The first is the erroneous belief that it is a conception which the social sciences have borrowed from biology. It was in fact the other way round, and if Charles Darwin was able successfully to apply to biology a concept which he had largely learned from the social sciences, this does not make it less important in the field in which it originated. It was in the discussion of such social formations as language and morals, law and money, that in the eighteenth century the twin conceptions of evolution and the spontaneous formation of an order were at last clearly formulated, and provided the intellectual tools which Darwin and his contemporaries were able to apply to biological evolution. Those eighteenth-century moral philosophers and the historical schools of law and language might well be described, as some of the theorists of language of the nineteenth century indeed described themselves, as Darwinians before Darwin.

A nineteenth-century social theorist who needed Darwin to teach him the idea of evolution was not worth his salt. Unfortunately some did, and produced views which under the name of ‘Social Darwinism’ have since been responsible for the distrust with which the concept of evolution has been regarded by social scientists.

There are, of course, important differences between the manner in which the process of selection operates in the cultural transmission that leads to the formation of social institutions, and the manner in which it operates in the selection of innate biological characteristics and their transmission by physiological inheritance. The error of ‘Social Darwinism’ was that it concentrated on the selection of individuals rather than on that of institutions and practices, and on the selection of innate rather than on culturally transmitted capacities of the individuals.”

The Economist: Does China’s digital police state have echoes in the West?

Reason: Supreme Court rules 8-1 against warrantless police search in important Fourth Amendment case

CNBC: How a Pentagon contract became an identity crisis for Google

BoingBoing: Leaked memos reveal the deep divisions within Google over Pentagon contract

Engadget: Google search showed ‘Nazism’ as California Republican Party ideology

Motherboard: ‘Techsploitation’ demonstrators blocked Google and Apple buses with scooters

Forbes: AI researchers create privacy filter for your online photos that disrupts facial recognition technology

National Review: The carnivores of civil liberties: “Liberalism rode high during the Watergate era. It had demanded that civil liberties be protected from the illegal or unconstitutional overreach of the Nixon-era FBI, CIA, and other agencies. Liberals alleged that out-of-control officials had spied on U.S. citizens for political purposes and then tried to mask their wrongdoing under the cover of “national security” or institutional “professionalism.”

All those legacies are now eroding. The Democratic party, the investigative media, and liberalism itself are now weirdly on the side of the reactionary administrative state. They have either downplayed or excused Watergate-like abuses of power by the former Barack Obama administration.”

National Review: Yes, the FBI was investigating the Trump campaign when it spied

Yeah right: The Verge: Google promises ethical principles to guide development of military AI

The Intercept: Face recognition is now being used in schools, but it won’t stop mass shootings

New York Post: Facebook slammed for ‘cheap trick’ to get people to accept privacy policy

ABC: Google’s plan for data-driven ‘smart city’ sparks privacy, democracy concerns

LA Times: Crackdown on immigrants takes toll on federal judge: “I have presided over a process that has destroyed families”

Common Dreams: 40+ rights groups demand Homeland Security release unredacted ‘race paper’ used to justify spying on activists

Boing Boing: The TSA has a secret enemies list of people who’ve complained about screeners

Engadget: Google Assistant is taught to fire a gun

The Federalist: The plug must be pulled on Google’s plan for thought control

Techdirt: Court has no problem with multiple invasive probings in search of drugs that didn’t exist

Gizmodo: Most federal agencies are ‘at risk’ or worse following damning cybersecurity report

Reason: Kim Kardashian is currently the nation’s greatest hope for prison reform

CATO: Nobody wins a trade war

The American Conservative: Police officers don’t need hate crime protections

Antiwar.com: The brilliance of Randolph Bourne

From Chapter 1 of Law, Legislation, and Liberty, where he frames the problem that fueled the work he produced during the second half of his academic career:

“The discussion of the problems with which we are concerned was long hampered by the universal acceptance of a misleading distinction which was introduced by the ancient Greeks and from whose confusing effect we have not yet wholly freed ourselves. This is the division of phenomena between those which in modern terms are ‘natural’ and those which are ‘artificial’. The original Greek terms, which seem to have been introduced by the Sophists of the fifth century B.C., were physei, which means ‘by nature’ and, in contrast to it, either nom? , best rendered as ‘by convention’, or thesei, which means roughly ‘by deliberate decision’.18 The use of two terms with somewhat different meanings to express the second part of the division indicates the confusion which has beset the discussion ever since. The distinction intended may be either between objects which existed independently and objects which were the results of human action, or between objects which arose independently of, and objects which arose as the result of, human design. The failure to distinguish between these two meanings led to the situation where one author could argue with regard to a given phenomenon that it was artificial because it was the result of human action, while another might describe the same phenomenon as natural because it was evidently not the result of human design. Not until the eighteenth century did thinkers like Bernard Mandeville and David Hume make it clear that there existed a category of phenomena which, depending on which of the two definitions one adhered to, would fall into either the one or the other of the two categories and therefore ought to be assigned to a distinct third class of phenomena, later described by Adam Ferguson as ‘the result of human action but not of human design’. These were the phenomena which required for their explanation a distinct body of theory and which came to provide the object of the theoretical social sciences.”

From Chapter 1 of Law, Legislation, and Liberty:

“Economics has long stressed the ‘division of labour’ which such a situation involves. But it has laid much less stress on the fragmentation of knowledge, on the fact that each member of society can have only a small fraction of the knowledge possessed by all, and that each is therefore ignorant of most of the facts on which the working of society rests. Yet it is the utilization of much more knowledge than anyone can possess, and therefore the fact that each moves within a coherent structure most of whose determinants are unknown to him, that constitutes the distinctive feature of all advanced civilizations.

In civilized society it is indeed not so much the greater knowledge that the individual can acquire, as the greater benefit he receives from the knowledge possessed by others, which is the cause of his ability to pursue an infinitely wider range of ends than merely the satisfaction of his most pressing physical needs.  Indeed, a ‘civilized’ individual may be very ignorant, more ignorant than many a savage, and yet greatly benefit from the civilization in which he lives.”

Somewhere in Constitution of Liberty, Hayek apocryphally quotes an anthropologist that it would be more accurate to say that we are a product of culture than the other way around.  It’s strange to think about how many decisions we make throughout the day make use of knowledge and experience of someone other than our own, or the knowledge and experience of generations of unknown people who have, by pursuing their own ends, paved the way for our use of their accumulated knowledge.  In turn, our daily actions, plans, expectations, are building and transforming knowledge and culture that some future unknown individual will make use of.  The future is not merely unknown, but unknowable.

LA Times: Supreme Court extends privacy protection to cars in a driveway

Reason: Is the FBI trying to bolster its war on cryptography?

HPPR: Texas DPS has spent millions on high-altitude surveillance planes

EFF: Amazon, stop powering government surveillance

The Intercept: Hidden horrors of “zero tolerance”–Mass trials and children taken from their parents

World Socialist Website: Leading Democratic activists accidentally share photos of immigrants detained under Obama admin.

GEORGE WILL: Trump’s trade wars would avenge only mythical job casualties

FEE: How jailing drug users increases opioid overdoses

Antiwar.com: Questioning war is a civic duty. Why do so few do it?

Gizmodo: Police are more likely to arrest you at a protest where people actually give a crap, study finds

The Conversation: We’re not prepared for the coming genetic revolution

Truthdig: How the Pentagon paid for NFL displays of patriotism

New York Times: Can 30,000 cameras solve Chicago’s crime problem?

The American Spectator: The London-to-Langley spy ring

Muckrock: In the 50’s, CIA decried Soviet torture tactics that would later be used at Gitmo and other Agency black sites

The American Conservative: UN: Another 10 million Yemenis at risk of starvation by year’s end

NextGov: This start-up’s racial-profiling algorithm shows AI can be dangerous way before any robot apocalypse

Buzzfeed: Disturbing video shows cop punching 20-year old woman in the head at a New Jersey beach

Reason: Government has ‘lost’ 1,475 unaccompanied minors it apprehended at the U.S. border

The Verge: Some candidates are blocked from buying ads on Facebook while waiting on authorization codes

Techdirt: Amazon Alexa instantaneously justifies years of surveillance paranoia

Activist Post: Families of MK Ultra victims file lawsuit over government mind control experiments

Cato: TSA still awful after 17 years

Truthdig: The ‘butterfly effect’ of nuclear war

JIM BOVARD: Your tax dollars bankroll Afghan child-molesters

Scientific American: What are the limits of manipulating nature?

From Last Words:

“ONE of the merits of democracy is quite obvious: it is perhaps the most charming form of government ever devised by man. The reason is not far to seek. It is based upon propositions that are palpably not true—and what is not true, as everyone knows, is always immensely more fascinating and satisfying to the vast majority of men than what is true. Truth has a harshness that alarms them, and an air of finality that collides with their incurable romanticism. They turn, in all the great emergencies of life, to the ancient promises, transparently false but immensely comforting, and of all those ancient promises there is none more comforting than the one to the effect that the lowly shall inherit the earth. It is at the bottom of the dominant religious system of the modern world, and it is at the bottom of the dominant political system. Democracy gives it a certain appearance of objective and demonstrable truth. The mob man, functioning as citizen, gets a feeling that he is really important to the world—that he is genuinely running things. Out of his maudlin herding after rogues and mountebanks there comes to him a sense of vast and mysterious power—which is what makes archbishops, police sergeants and other such magnificoes happy. And out of it there comes, too, a conviction that he is somehow wise, that his views are taken seriously by his betters—which is what makes United States Senators, fortune-tellers and Young Intellectuals happy. Finally, there comes out of it a glowing consciousness of a high duty triumphantly done—which is what makes hangmen and husbands happy.”

I’m all for bringing back monarchy, where at least then the State didn’t pretend to be anything other than what it was.  Democracy rests on the painfully obvious falsity that “we are the government”. Monarchies clearly know what they are and what they represent.  Their lack of pretension gives monarchies an elegance and beauty that democracies lack.  And, as history has shown, those States that have cloaked themselves in the propaganda that they were really “the people” are those that have slaughtered more of their own people than any other.  Think Russia, China, Cuba, etc.  Governments most given over to the “the people are the government” fiction are without fail always the most totalitarian.  Hans Hermanne-Hoppe’s Democracy, the God That Failed, a book that deserves to be quoted here occasionally, taught us that only during the age of “democracy” and the elimination of monarchy did the age of total war begin.  We are not the government. We are not our jailers, we are not the monopoly on the use of violence.  We are citizens separate from the State, and that understanding is indispensable to our control over the State.