Engadget: Facebook’s ‘Sauron alert’ protects staff against privacy breaches

Tech Times: Facebook used your Instagram images to train its image recognition AI

Activist Post: Pentagon seeks $300 million for 65,000 US-backed forces in Syria

WSWS: Trump ends protected status for 86,000 Hondurans

FEE: Curing disease is sustainable, government in healthcare is not

Mises: “Real socialism” has indeed been tried–and it’s been a disaster

The American Conservative: The Saudi coalition’s starvation of Yemen hasn’t ended

High Times: 8 worst portrayals of weed in television shows

I remain shocked that the Malthusian population bomb theory was the basis for Thanos’ universe-spanning campaign of genocide in the latest Avengers film.  That it was expounded by Thanos himself in such plain, Malthusian terms is even more shocking.  While watching the film though, I wished that at least one Avenger had countered that ideology with facts and theories, instead of mere violence.  An Avengers analog of Julian Simon to counter the biologist Paul Ehrlich embodied in Thanos.  Because even if Thanos were destroyed, the population bomb thesis would still exist unrefuted in the Avengers universe.

Business professor Julian Simon and biologist Paul Ehrlich made a bet in 1980 on which direction the prices of certain resources would go over the next decade.  Simon challenged Ehrlich, and gave him the option of picking which resources to track over the next years.  All five commodities Ehrlich chose decreased in price over the next decade.

The population of the globe more than doubled over the past 50 years, yet food production tripled. According the overpopulation alarmists, this should have been impossible.  Human life expectancy across the globe reached its highest level so far, and global poverty fell below 10%, the lowest on record.

Yet despite these facts, and despite the total failure of Ehrlich’s theory, academics and totalitarian governments around the world believe that it’s immoral to have more than one child, as it is has been in China, that the human race is dooming itself by not checking it’s growth.

The key to this rapid rise in living standards in the face of a seeming explosion in population has to do with what Julian Simon dubbed “the ultimate resource”.  This resource is human creativity, and he believed that our rising living standards weren’t occurring despite population growth, but because of it.  More people on the planet means more creators, innovators, and workers engaging in what Deirdre McCloskey calls “market-tested innovation“. The unrestricted innovation, entrepreneurship, and tinkering with new and different ideas, and the testing of all of it in the marketplace is the source of our prosperity.  That’s why it is crucial that we protect that environment of market-tested experimentation in the face of an irrational fear of population growth.  As long as the freedom to innovate and experiment in an unrestricted market economy, economic prosperity will always outstrip resource consumption.  A politicized fear of overpopulation is what will doom our species, not population growth itself.

Gizmodo: The NSA managed to collect 500 million US call records in 2017 despite targeting just 40 people

The Intercept: How Scott Pruitt helped Arkansas poultry giants pollute one of Oklahoma’s prettiest rivers

Ars Technica: Body-cam giant snaps up biggest rival to create near-monopoly

Reason: Conservatives need to put aside kneejerk police support

And another one: The Federalist: The real villain in Avengers: Infinity War is overpopulation panic

Wired UK: Facial recognition tech used by UK police is making a ton of mistakes

New York Times: Why are US troops in the Yemen war?

Motherboard: Idaho State University lost enough weapons-grade plutonium to make a dirty bomb

Forbes: Dyson spheres are missing from the galaxy

Vox: The Golden State Killer case shows how swiftly we’re losing genetic privacy

ZDnet: Tech giants hit by NSA spying slam encryption backdoors

Gizmodo: Chicago advances bill allowing police drones to surveil protestors

DW: Whistleblower Chelsea Manning in Berlin warns over Google, Facebook privacy

Techdirt: Virginia Supreme Court says license plate readers collect personal data; suggests use violates state law

Washington Examiner: Alan Dershowitz: Michael Cohen wiretap shows the US is becoming a surveillance state

The Federalist: Google’s insane campus is what happens when you politicize everything

Reason: Maine legislators override governor’s veto of marijuana legalization

FFF: The Bundy Ranch case explains Westerner’s distrust of Washington

Of course he does: NDTV: Bill Gates praises Aadhaar, says “it doesn’t pose any privacy issue” Ed: Gotta love that predictable elitist condescension in their “I know what’s best for the Third World” attitude. It shapes every aspect of his vanity-flattering, “humanitarian” efforts in countries that do not want nor need it.  What the Third World needs most is protection from these First World humanitarians.

Interestingly, it’s the elites that buy into the overpopulation myth, and there have been quite a few well-written pieces coming out in recent days as it becomes obvious that the Avenger’s Thanos is motivated by the fear of overpopulation.  Here is one such piece from National Review: Infinity War: Thanos plans to cull humans, echoing Paul and Anne Erlich

Wall Street Journal: The new science of psychedelics

Nature: The ethics of experimenting with human brain tissue Ed: Could we soon create a brain in a vat that contemplates whether it’s a brain in a vat?

What I recently watched unfold before my eyes at the movie theater had a bizarre synchronicity, considering how much thought I’d given the topic lately: the overpopulation myth taken to its inevitable conclusion.  Thanos, the villian of the latest Avengers film, is a dupe, religiously devoted to the idea that the universe itself is overpopulated, and must be cut in half via genocide on a mind-boggling scale.  That may or may not be a spoiler.  Stranger still, it seems almost as if Thanos has been given this justification for total evil as a way to make him a sympathetic character.  A more human touch, since he’s doing this for the good of the universe. His overpopulation thesis, when he tells it, is an overt cue for the audience to slowly nod their heads in reluctant agreement that yes, resources are finite, and, to his eyes, populations are exploding at an unsustainable rate. Therefore, he must step in and do the hard but necessary thing of murdering half the universe.  Thanos doesn’t appear to have ever heard of the Simon/Erlich wager, comparative advantage, or economics at all.  Which also props up my theory that the overpopulation argument is an appeal to the “man-in-the-street”, in that, on the surface, it appears imminently reasonable, in exactly the same way that trade protectionism, socialism, and nationalism appear very reasonable.

Thanos is what you get when you convince enough people that “overpopulation”, whatever that means, is a problem that must be remedied.

More on this tomorrow.

Gizmodo: Oakland passes nation’s strongest surveillance technology ordinance yet

The Intercept: New bipartisan bill could give President the power to imprison US citizens in military detention forever

Activist Post: James Comey says Deep State doesn’t exist, then describes the Deep State’s existence

LA Times: Technology turns our cities into spies for ICE, whether we like it or not

Reason: New York officials weaponize regulatory power against the NRA

The Hill: TSA forced to check whether air marshals show up to work sober: report

Techdirt: Amazon joins Google in making censorship easy, threatens signal for circumventing censorship regimes

FEE: Bigotry and compulsory inclusion are both collectivist

Cato: The 14 most common arguments against immigration and why they’re wrong

National Interest: Why Washington turns a blind eye to Egypt’s thugocracy Ed: Our government has no business worrying about the internal affairs of any foreign nation, thug state or not.  But it’s important to note the selective outrage that emanates from DC in regards to overseas atrocities.  Yemen, for example, is suffering thousands of innocent dead from Saudi Arabia’s U.S.-backed war of attrition and no one in D.C. cares, because Saudi Arabia is a thug state of America’s own making.  Our entire foreign policy could be boiled down into the propping up of various thug states across the globe, whether it be the Saudis, Ukrainian neo-Nazis, among other various and sundry tin pots who are promised American dollars in exchange for the subjection of their people.

On the topic of US-back Neo-Nazis in Ukraine is this just-published gem at The Nation: America’s collusion with Neo-Nazis:   “That stormtroop-like assaults on gays, Jews, elderly ethnic Russians, and other “impure” citizens are widespread throughout Kiev-ruled Ukraine, along with torchlight marches reminiscent of those that eventually inflamed Germany in the late 1920s and 1930s. And that the police and official legal authorities do virtually nothing to prevent these neo-fascist acts or to prosecute them. On the contrary, Kiev has officially encouraged them by systematically rehabilitating and even memorializing Ukrainian collaborators with Nazi German extermination pogroms and their leaders  during World War II, renaming streets in their honor, building monuments to them, rewriting history to glorify them, and more.”

A small note on fascism: Fascism takes root so quickly in populations, with entire populations who insist that they are firmly against fascism yet backpedal into the thing they profess to oppose, because fascist rhetoric appeals to a primitive instinct that resides within all of us.  Fascism is nothing more than a militant tribalism, the fascist program exploits this aspect of human psychology to build power.  Tribalist rhetoric sustains it, and inspires dimwits to murder and die for it.  The fight against totalitarianism, and fascism, is also a fight against that instinct within us.

Cato: Drones on the border: efficacy and privacy implications

Zero Hedge: Trump “all but decided to withdraw” from Iran deal as IAEA refutes Netanyahu speech

Inverse: MDMA successfully treats PTSD in new study, scientists eye FDA approval Ed: On the verge of an historic revolution in medicine, an end of the slavery to deadly, insanity-inducing pharmaceuticals by way of marijuana and psychedelics

Cosmos: How psychedelic therapies are making a comeback

Reason: Police body cameras may get facial recognition. Ed: A measure fought for by transparency advocates as a way to increase police accountability will now transform cops into walking avatars of the surveillance state.

Gizmodo: Companies in China are using brain sensors to monitor employees’ emotions

New York Times: Creepy or not? Your privacy concerns likely reflect your politics

USA Today: The walls have eyes for potential home buyers

Asia Times: Australia eyes wider spying on its citizens

Motherboard: Pimps are preying on sex workers pushed off web because of FOSTA/SESTA Ed: The solution to the human trafficking problem is the complete and utter legalization of prostitution. Violence and victimization are inherent to an illegal transaction, because neither party has recourse to courts of law.

Defense News: US makes it cheaper for foreign nations to buy American weapons

Mises Institute: Baby Alfie, the latest victim of omnipotent government

The American Conservative: Britain’s nervous breakdown

Boston Globe: Hoisting the false flag

FEE: How foreign competition strengthens domestic firms

The Intercept: Why do so many denounce authoritarianism from Trump and Putin, but not from Israel’s Netanyahu?

ACLU: The CIA gives a highly sanitized view of Gina Haspel while keeping her torture record secret

Rutherford Institute: While America feuds, the Police State shifts into high gear

Reason: Republicans love federal snooping: “Although Trump and Republican allies like Rep. Devin Nunes (R–Calif.), chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, say the FBI broke the rules to engage in surveillance against members of Trump’s campaign, they resisted the chance to fix the underlying problem. In January, Nunes and 177 other GOP legislators voted against the bill to restrict domestic snooping, then advanced and passed a different bill to renew Section 702. Rather than scaling back domestic surveillance powers, the legislation expanded them, explicitly permitting the FBI to use foreign surveillance rules to fight domestic crimes.”

Activist Post: Military-Industrial complex stocks sent crashing as North and South Korea achieve peace

FEE: Billions have suffered ‘The Handmaid’s Tale” in reverse thanks to overpopulation myths Ed: Out of every delusional mass hysteria that totalitarianism and mass death could be built upon, the overpopulation fear stands out as by far the worst, because it seems the most reasonable, and most “reasonable” people appear to hold a view that there might be “too many people” already alive on this planet already.  Hideously benign books, like the popular Ishmael have propagated the superstition that we could be reaching a scenario where “too many people” exist on Earth, that is constitutes a crisis which can only be solved by government.  Guess what type of government is more than willing to “solve” just this type of “crisis”.  Sterilization, the forced abortion of those seen as inferior, the resurgence of eugenic thinking similar to what has appeared recently in Iceland in regards to the abortion rate for babies with Down Syndrome. The population of the world doubled, from 3.5 to 7 billion, during the past 50 years. Yet during the past 50 years, poverty and hunger have plummeted across the globe.  Living standards are constantly rising, in large part due to the unsung miracle that is comparative advantage, which basically states that everyone, no matter how “unskilled” has a place within a market economy to improve not only their own lives, but by doing so also improves the lives of everyone around them.  The overpopulation myth is a vehicle for demonizing other races, nationalities, those of lower IQ or with other “defects”, and it’s terrifying to imagine to how great effect a skillful politician could use such a will o’ the wisp.  We have nothing to fear as long as we preserve liberty.

The Intercept: It’s impossible to prove your laptop hasn’t been hacked. I spent two years finding out.

National Review: Don’t be mad at Wolf’s Sanders jokes if you’ve never been mad at Trump

The Nation: Sci-fi visions become reality in China’s AI use

From my well-worn copy of his The Constitution of Liberty, chapter 6:

“A society in which the position of the individuals was made to correspond to human ideas of moral merit would therefore be the exact opposite of a free society. It would be a society in which people were rewarded for duty performed instead of for success, in which every move of every individual was guided by what other people thought he ought to do, and in which the individual was thus relieved of the responsibility and the risk of decision. But if nobody’s knowledge is sufficient to guide all human action, there is also no human being who is competent to reward all efforts according to merit.

In our individual conduct we generally act on the assumption that it is the value of a person’s performance and not his merit that determines our obligation to him. Whatever may be true in more intimate relations, in the ordinary business of life we do not feel that, because a man has rendered us a service at a great sacrifice, our debt to him is determined by this, so long as we could have had the same service provided with ease by somebody else. In our dealings with other men we feel that we are doing justice if we recompense value rendered with equal value, without inquiring what it might have cost the particular individual to supply us with these services. What determines our responsibility is the advantage we derive from what others offer us, not their merit in providing it. We also expect in our dealings with others to be remunerated not according to our subjective merit but according to what our services are worth to them. Indeed, so long as we think in terms of our relations to particular people, we are generally quite aware that the mark of the free man is to be dependent for his livelihood not on other people’s views of his merit but solely on what he has to offer them. It is only when we think of our position or our income as determined by “society” as a whole that we demand reward according to merit.”

WhoWhatWhy: Spy University: How intelligence agencies recruit their next generation on U.S. campuses

The Intercept: The botched Cliven Bundy case was just the latest example of prosecutorial misconduct in Las Vegas

Techdirt: Appeals court: Driving attentively while black isn’t probable cause for traffic stop

Motherboard: The price of filming police violence

Zero Hedge: Amazon admits hackers could turn Echo speakers into listening devices

The Federalist: Why single-payer healthcare denies care to children like Alfie Evans

Reason: To save lives, make naloxone an over-the-counter drug

Reason: New York politicians want to suppress free assembly rights for gun rights supporters

Consortium News: Weapons inspector refutes US Syria chemical weapons claims

Mises: The war on cash is even worse than it seems

FEE: Bernie Sanders doesn’t understand how jobs are created

Time: A DNA site helped authorities crack the Golden State killer case. Here’s what you should know about your genetic privacy.

Electronic Intifada: Israeli snipers targeting journalists in Gaza

Truthdig: Department of Offense

High Times: YouTube remains silent as weed pages are purged