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

The Intercept: Facebook is demanding personal information from political advertisers, raising privacy concerns

The Verge: A pioneer in predictive policing is starting a troubling new project

The Week: The next frontier in criminal justice reform. One of my favorite writers, Bonnie Kristian, discusses the almost never-mentioned problem of America’s out-of-control district attorneys:

“Prosecutors in America, most commonly called district attorneys, have enormous and often unaccountable discretion. “They can choose how harshly to go after someone, how lenient to go after someone,” explainsJohn Pfaff, a Fordham University professor of criminal law. “They have tremendous power in that respect.”

City Lab: America’s justice system has the wrong goals

The Guardian: The ‘deep state’ is real. But are its leaks against Trump justified? Ed: I attempt to post every article discussing our permanent, unelected, real government.

New York Times: Do Americans know they’re handing out billions to corporations?

OC Register: US-backed Saudi coalition just killed dozens of civilians in Yemen

JFKfacts: CIA is still protecting spy who shadowed MLK Jr.

Bloomberg: Google aims at privacy law after Facebook lobbying failed

The Federalist: Here’s how Facebook decides what you can and can’t post

Common Dreams: A company announces its intent to create the world’s newest privacy nightmare

Wall Street Journal: Brain-computer interfaces: ‘The last frontier of human privacy”

Activist Post: “Smart City” projects are really police cam-share programs in disguise

The Hill: Congress is walking the online privacy tightrope with oversight

Fast Company: China’s terrifying “social credit” surveillance system is expanding

ZDnet: Dawn of the smart surveillance cameras

The Intercept: Comey says FBI’s surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr. was “shameful”, but Comey’s FBI also surveilled black activists

USA Today: Trump executive order fails to boost flow of military to police departments.  Thank god

The American Conservative: The pretty little lies behind America’s endless wars

Reason: Net neutrality is officially dead. That’s a victory for free speech.

Truthdig: Why the DNC is fighting Wikileaks and not Wall Street

Salon: Are psychedelics the answer to addiction and depression?

Bloomberg: Palantir knows everything about you

Techdirt: Lawmakers ask FBI why it isn’t getting busy cracking its stockpile of seized smartphones

Reason: Public transit becomes another tool for total government surveillance

National Interest: Here are all the reasons striking Syria was a bad idea

Zero Hedge: Army building “self-aware” squid-like robot that can be 3D-printed during combat

AEI: On Earth Day, let’s appreciate fossil fuels

Mises: Fear global warming? Markets offer our best chance for survival

FEE: 18 spectacularly wrong predictions made around the first Earth Day in 1970

American Conservative: State Department report whitewashes Saudi war crimes in Yemen

Antiwar.com: There was nothing humanitarian about our strikes in Syria

Consortium News: Beware of white helmets bearing news

Independent Institute: Think twice about bringing back U.S. manufacturing jobs

City Lab: Getting high is a civil right

The Federalist: Chuck Schumer explains why federalism is right for pot, wrong for everything else.

Reason: In defense of cash

Scientific American: Should quantum anomalies make us rethink reality?

LADbible: People take LSD and then try to assemble Ikea furniture

Here’s an 80-something Hayek discussing the central problem of social theory for modern, complex societies, or what he refers somewhat lightly to as “the knowledge problem”, in the sense that no central authority could possibly acquire and use the virtually endless knowledge produced by all social actors in order to form a plan that wouldn’t end in mass starvation.  And, as forgotten theorist of uncertainty George Shackle noted, we are all planning for an unknowable future, all the time.  So in a sense, multiple futures already exist in our consciousness, and we act in pursuit of those futures based on the actions of everyone else in society, actions which are also the product of minds that are searching in the dark to gain a foothold on one possible future.  Strange, once you think about it.  The next thought inevitably, then, is, “how does society function at all, with so much uncertainty about the future?” Therein lies the central problem that thinkers such as Hayek, Shackle, Keynes, and the modern-day writer Nassim Taleb, in his Incerto trilogy, sought to solve.  With Taleb being a more ostentatious, yet derivative, version of much of Hayek’s later work.  Many creations of culture, products of human action yet not of human design, can be interpreted as a means of alleviating such radical uncertainty. Money, language, interest rates, prices all are part of the invisible web that make social order possible.  I’m going to go ahead and insert an extended quote from Hayek’s famous essay, ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society‘, to further drive home his point about the significance of prices:

“We must look at the price system as such a mechanism for communicating information if we want to understand its real function—a function which, of course, it fulfils less perfectly as prices grow more rigid. (Even when quoted prices have become quite rigid, however, the forces which would operate through changes in price still operate to a considerable extent through changes in the other terms of the contract.) The most significant fact about this system is the economy of knowledge with which it operates, or how little the individual participants need to know in order to be able to take the right action. In abbreviated form, by a kind of symbol, only the most essential information is passed on and passed on only to those concerned. It is more than a metaphor to describe the price system as a kind of machinery for registering change, or a system of telecommunications which enables individual producers to watch merely the movement of a few pointers, as an engineer might watch the hands of a few dials, in order to adjust their activities to changes of which they may never know more than is reflected in the price movement.

Of course, these adjustments are probably never “perfect” in the sense in which the economist conceives of them in his equilibrium analysis. But I fear that our theoretical habits of approaching the problem with the assumption of more or less perfect knowledge on the part of almost everyone has made us somewhat blind to the true function of the price mechanism and led us to apply rather misleading standards in judging its efficiency. The marvel is that in a case like that of a scarcity of one raw material, without an order being issued, without more than perhaps a handful of people knowing the cause, tens of thousands of people whose identity could not be ascertained by months of investigation, are made to use the material or its products more sparingly; i.e.,they move in the right direction. This is enough of a marvel even if, in a constantly changing world, not all will hit it off so perfectly that their profit rates will always be maintained at the same constant or “normal” level.

I have deliberately used the word “marvel” to shock the reader out of the complacency with which we often take the working of this mechanism for granted. I am convinced that if it were the result of deliberate human design, and if the people guided by the price changes understood that their decisions have significance far beyond their immediate aim, this mechanism would have been acclaimed as one of the greatest triumphs of the human mind. Its misfortune is the double one that it is not the product of human design and that the people guided by it usually do not know why they are made to do what they do. But those who clamor for “conscious direction”—and who cannot believe that anything which has evolved without design (and even without our understanding it) should solve problems which we should not be able to solve consciously—should remember this: The problem is precisely how to extend the span of our utilization of resources beyond the span of the control of any one mind; and therefore, how to dispense with the need of conscious control, and how to provide inducements which will make the individuals do the desirable things without anyone having to tell them what to do.”

As an aside, there is something about Hayek’s voice, slight though it is, that seems to wake the dead, or least slumbering child and dog.  I can play Star Trek reruns in the background all night and nothing stirs, but the moment Hayek’s thick Austrian accent begins quietly playing, doggo perks up like her castle is under seige.

From The Road to Serfdom:

“The totalitarian leader must collect around him a group which is prepared voluntarily to submit to that discipline they are to impose by force upon the rest of the people. That socialism can be put into practice only by methods of which most socialists
 disapprove is, of course, a lesson learned by many social reformers in the past. The old socialist parties were inhibited by their
democratic ideals; they did not possess the ruthlessness required for the performance of their chosen task. It is characteristic that both in Germany and in Italy the success of fascism was preceded by the refusal of the socialist parties to take over the responsibilities of government. They were unwilling wholeheartedly to employ the methods to which they had pointed the way. They still hoped for the miracle of a majority’s agreeing on a particular plan for the organization of the whole of society. Others had already learned the lesson that in a planned society the question can no longer be on what do a majority of the people agree but what the largest single group is whose members agree sufficiently to make unified direction of all affairs possible.”

The best way to view the power you wish to grant to government is to imagine that power being wielded by someone who’s political viewpoints you despise.

Activist Post: Senators call on Homeland Security to release info on D.C. cell phone surveillance

ACLU: How an Irish court ruling could affect U.S. spying

Nextgov: DARPA wants to merge human and computer cyber defenders

TechCrunch: Orchid Labs is in the process of raising $125 million for its surveillance-free layer atop the internet

Axios: How Peter Thiel’s Palantir tracks American citizens

Forbes: Bad things happen when you don’t update your privacy settings

The Intercept: The War on Pot marches on: In nearly half the country, marijuana arrests have gone up since 2014

Reason: The war on opioids probably helped kill Prince

The Atlantic: Anatomy of a Silicon Valley pot deal

FEE: Is the U.S. now freer than Europe in terms of pot decriminalization?

Reason: How we lost privacy: “Where people once feared surveillance in their residences, their children now provide the cameras and microphones themselves. Home security systems offer live video streams accessible anywhere. People share their private conversations with devices such as Google Home and Amazon’s Echo. The recent subpoena of an Alexa—the artificial intelligence inside an Echo—that may have “witnessed” a homicide should give all of us pause about what our devices may be recording even when we think they’re not.

That’s the crux of the matter: Even people who resist the idea of the government having our information will willingly open the curtains to private companies—some of whom then turn what they learn over to the government, or leave it vulnerable to hackers. They have our names, our addresses, our bank details, our pictures, our email correspondence, even our current heart rate. Their geotracking knows where we are at any time.”

USA Today: Facebook fights to keep using your face

Activist Post: Police testing controversial portable DNA machine

Techdirt: The war on whistleblowers claims another casualty

BoingBoing: Government accidentally sends file on “remote mind control” methods to journalist

The American Conservative: John Bolton: In search of Carthage

DefenseOne: Pentagon is building an AI factory

Daily Beast: Fake pain pills killed Prince, along with thousands more Americans

Herb: Will psychedelics go corporate like cannabis?

National Geographic: ‘Exploding ant’ rips itself apart to protect its own

Antiwar.com: UN security team delays chemical weapons inspectors from reaching site of supposed attack. Ed: Unbelievable, yet totally believable, that we are inciting another foreign conflict at the very moment that Syria had quelled the “rebels” and peace had been within reach. Unbelievable that just a handful of people in our own government can bypass all of Congress and provoke a widespread, possibly-nuclear conflict over a supposed chemical weapons attack that is said to have killed around 70 people.  Why would Assad attack his own civilians at the very moment an end to the conflict was in sight? And also, why does our own government suddenly care about foreign civilians? Where are the airstrikes on behalf of the thousands of dead Yemen civilians? Oh right, the US is funding the airstrikes that are killing those civilians, via the murderous Saudi regime.  The danger in this situation lies in the fact that so few Americans are willing to get behind a war against either Syria or Russia.  This sets the stage for a convenient attack that will result in the casualties of American citizens, one that will then conveniently be used to steer public opinion in favor of yet another open-ended, decade-long war, conveniently justifying the next trillion-dollar Pentagon budget.

WSWS: As lies of Syrian gas attack unravel, US and UK shift to claims of Russian “cyber war”

Counterpunch: President Trump’s war crime is worse than the one he accuses Assad of Ed: Initiating aggression against a sovereign nation. Punishable by death according to Nuremberg.

BGR: Pay close attention to Facebook’s new passive-aggressive privacy settings

National Review: The bulldozers of social justice

The Intercept: James Comey sees himself as a victim of Trump. He refuses to see the victims of the justice system. Ed: In the interviews of Comey that I’ve watched, I’ve noticed a disturbing trait that I’ve seen before in other people, particularly in political figures and other people who hold positions of power: an absolute belief in their goodness, that they are beyond reproach, that their actions are good in an absolute sense.  These people are the most dangerous because they aren’t hindered by guilt, self-reflection, or humility. Which means they are capable of great damage for a longer duration than others.  I believe that politics naturally attracts this type of person, due to the nature of the work.  “The worst get on top”, as Hayek forcefully argues in The Road to Serfdom. In Comey, it manifests as a vainglorious, petty, sanctimony, and it’s an ugly thing to behold. It’s also the prime move of racists, class-warfare-ists, and general, all-around totalitarians. I believe the instinct is within us all, which is probably the larger point I should be making here, because the nature of government propaganda is to draw it out, to unhinge it from the natural guilt we would feel had our minds not been trained through peer and authoritarian pressure to unleash this primitive prejudice on one group or another.  To government, it doesn’t matter what we wish government to do, as long as we wish them to do it.  It’s the authoritarian instinct unbound that matters.

Reason: A more infuriating way to think about your tax burden

FEE: Why socialism means slavery

Motherboard: Amazon wins patent for data stream to ‘identify’ Bitcoin users for law enforcement

Nextgov: Army figures out how to use facial recognition in the dark

Daily Beast: Unarmed teen killed by police was simply ‘backing his mom’s minivan’ out of garage, lawsuit claims Ed: Let them unionize, protect them from punishment, and they will predictably behave like thugs.