AEI: Facebook’s convenient desire to be regulated

ZDNet: Supreme Court drops Microsoft data privacy case, but the battle isn’t over

Mashable: Facebook’s facial recognition features could cost it billions of dollars in class-action lawsuit

Reason: Comey acknowledges screwing up in encryption fight, but he still doesn’t grasp the issue

Motherboard: UK government is cozy with companies selling spytech

Activist Post: Social media now being used by police and intelligence agencies to collect biometrics

Common Dreams: ‘Astronomical’ costs of war: Average US taxpayer sent $3,456 to Pentagon last year, and just $39 to EPA

Mises: America picks a fight with its largest foreign creditor

The American Conservative: Senators offer up unprecedented war powers to President

FEE: You can’t argue against socialism’s 100% failure rate

Gizmodo: 3 better alternatives to Gmail’s self-destructing emails

Cosmos: ‘Nuclear geyser’ may be origin of life

From his book, Jefferson:

“Throughout his life, Mr. Jefferson consistently maintained that “the most effectual means of preventing the perversion of power into tyranny are to illuminate so far as possible the minds of the people.” He had no doubt that “if a nation expects to be ignorant and free…it expects what never was and never will be.” He seems never to suspected, however, the ease with which mere literacy is perverted, and that it is therefore quite possible for a literate people to be much more ignorant than an illiterate people–that a people of well-perverted literacy, indeed, is invincibly unintelligent.”

This is far more profound than it appears on a first reading.  And it’s not that the mere teaching of reading, writing, and arithmetic that is damaging to the independence of thought of children, but the insidious weaving of propaganda and State-approved theories of social organization into daily instruction.  If only schools would refocus all that energy, wasted into getting kids to accept various social philosophies that prop up the State, solely into reading comprehension, and our country might now have such an abysmally low level of reading ability.

Instead, government-approved versions of history, the worship of the symbols of government through the strangely non-subtle ‘Pledge of Allegiance’, a conditioning to accept a warden/prisoner environment for an unnaturally long time, remain the focal point.

As I recently discovered, dogs apparently enjoy chewing through internet cables. Republic Reborn is back.

Tech Crunch: How to save your privacy from the internet’s clutches

Birmingham Mail: If Facebook isn’t spying on us, why did I get ads for things I just chatted about?

Bustle: Gmail’s new confidential mode may let users send “self-destructing” emails

Motherboard: Lawmakers call FBI’s ‘going dark’ narrative ‘highly questionable’ after Motherboard shows cops can easily hack iPhones

HardOCP: Cops around the country can now unlock iPhones, records show

Fast Company: Fired FBI director James Comey reveal how Apple and Google’s encryption efforts “drove me crazy”

Reason: Silicon Valley’s dangerous political blind spots

Ars Technica: Cop won’t be charged in “swatting” death of innocent, unarmed man

The Intercept: Trump ordered Syria strike based on secret legal justification even Congress can’t see

National Interest: In 1973, America and Russia almost fought a nuclear war over Syria

The Federalist: Britain’s knife control is a bad, real-life parody of gun control

Mises: How the Postal Service loses so much money

Reader’s Digest: 13 sneaky ways FBI agents protect their homes

High Times: Trump makes deal to protect states with legal cannabis

Brinkwire: Einstein’s ‘Dice of God’ has been used to generate truly random numbers

Gizmodo: A spooky quantum experiment creates what may be the most entangled controllable device yet

Mises: Don’t regulate Facebook. That’s what Zuckerberg wants.

BoingBoing: Peak Zuckerberg: “What’s a shadow profile?”

The Intercept: Why did the EPA’s Scott Pruitt suppress a report on corruption in Oklahoma?

Telegraph: Facial recognition used to catch fugitive among 60,000 concertgoers in China

Techdirt: California bill could introduce a Constitutionally-questionable “right to be forgotten” in the US

The Atlantic: Trump’s dangerous threat of war

Reason: Overdose deaths are a product of drug prohibition

 Federalist: School rules that allowed Parkland shooter to get guns coming soon to your district

High Times: These six industries don’t want hemp legalized

Quartz: Scientists keep “discovering” things stoners already know

Research Digest: Caffeine causes widespread brain entropy (apparently a good thing)

The Verge: New, ‘high definition’ vinyl promises longer playing time and louder, clearer audio

Reflecting on the topic of mortality, either of our own or that of family, friend, or some public figure whose lifelong labor will outlive them, inevitably brings out the poetic sense in even the most unfeeling of us.  The prospect of libertarian author Justin Raimondo’s mortality, from the news of his battle with cancer, brings to my mind Alfred Tennyson’s Ulysses.  Here is my personal favorite excerpt:

New York Times: What you don’t know about how Facebook uses your data

LA Times: Facebook will no longer fund campaign opposing proposed California consumer privacy initiative

Activist Post: The same government that spies on its citizens is lecturing the Facebook CEO for doing the same thing

 Breitbart: Master Mark: “We don’t think what we are doing is censoring speech”

MuckRock: Chicago police department coaches officers on how to avoid the same social media surveillance they themselves employ

Al Jazeera: Oil prices soar over fears of a US strike on Syria

Salon: Trump launches a new drug war, but who’s the real enemy?

Reason: It’s good news for libertarians when Paul Ryan quits Congress

FEE: Why the social engineers of the Sixties failed to create a “Great Society”

Cato: Candy-coated cartel: Time to kill the US sugar program

Also Cato: No strategic, tactical, legal, or humanitarian justification for US airstrikes in Syria

Consortium News: International lawyers: Strike against Syria would be illegal

The American Conservative: Trump surrenders to the foreign policy blob : “President Trump recently spoke an essential truth on foreign policy when he stated that American troops should come home from Syria. The Islamic State has been defeated and Washington has no business trying to overthrow Assad, dismember Syria, get between the Turks and Kurds, confront Russia and Iran, and whatever other inane quests the neocon think tanks have come up with.

However, the Blob—as the foreign policy establishment and its extensive network of analysts, pundits, and officials is known—also dominates the president’s staff. Indeed, it is not clear he has anyone working for him, at least at the State Department, Pentagon, and National Security Council, who is not a card-carrying member of the Blob. That means his foreign policy aides spend most of their time trying to talk him out of his most sensible ideas.”

Truthdig: YouTube blocks video criticizing Israeli militarism

In between cancer treatments, Justin Raimondo reflects on the purpose behind his writing and his website

EFF: The U.S. CLOUD Act and the EU: A privacy protection race to the bottom

Metro: Facebook can predict people’s behavior by spying through their smartphone, patent reveals

WSWS: Behind the Facebook data scandal: The drive to censor the internet

The Hill: It would have taken more than privacy laws to prevent the Cambridge Analytica scandal

Reason: A bunch of Senators just showed they have no idea how Facebook works. They want to regulate it anyway.

Mashable: When ICE asks Facebook for help, Zuckerberg pledges to say ‘no’

National Review: Mark Zuckerberg’s insufferable tripe

The Week: The case for doing nothing in Syria

The American Conservative: Trump’s rush to judgment on Syria chemical attack

SHELDON RICHMAN: Who’s afraid of Russian propaganda?

Activist Post: Homeland Security thinks wearing black means you’re an anarchist

Mises: Why big government, big banks, and big tech all hate cash

Reason: Beware censorship by proxy: “Just as one effective end-run around the Fourth Amendment is to ask private companies for data they slurped up on their own, the First Amendment can be sidestepped when officials pressure the private sector into self-censorship. The end result can be rules more restrictive than the companies would impose on their own—and more intrusive than the government could get away with if it tried to impose them directly.”

Washington Post: How the FBI uses the Freedom of Information Act to track down whistleblowers

City Lab: The evolution of domestic spying since MLK in Memphis

Independent: Is YouTube spying on your children? FTC complaint warns of improper data collection

Futurism: World’s most valuable AI startup also happens to be a part of “the world’s biggest system of surveillance”

Bloomberg: America’s virtual border wall is a 1,954-mile-long money pit

The Federalist: How eradicating bad bots can quickly mutate into cracking down on free humans

Variety: Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak deactivates Facebook account over privacy concerns

Mises: What makes AI dangerous? The State.

Techdirt: FBI is using classified tools for regular investigations and that’s going to end up hurting everyone

LA Times: Trump’s impulsive, falsehood-laden call to militarize the U.S.-Mexico border

Volokh: Wells Fargo resists union threats aimed at getting it to drop gun manufacturer clients

From his essay, The State vs. Liberty:

“Taxation is theft, purely and simply even though it is theft on a grand and colossal scale which no acknowledged criminals could hope to match. It is a compulsory seizure of the property of the State’s inhabitants, or subjects.”

If taxation isn’t theft, then the implication is that the government owns every bit of your property, allowing you to keep what you currently have as a privilege.  In other words, the master/slave dynamic.

The Hill: New push to break deadlock over encrypted phones

Ars Technica: How to keep your ISP’s nose out of your browser history with encrypted DNS

Futurism: Facebook sought medical data. Yes, that should raise red flags.

Activist Post: Homeland Security wants to create profiles of journalists and “media influencers” who mention its name

The Week: Gun owners against police violence

Zero Hedge: How gun control laws for “mentally ill” could disarm those who question authority

Reason: Was Trump elected to take revenge on job-stealing robots? If so, he’s doing great work

The American Conservative: Sinclair and the fake news battle that never ends

WENDY MCELROY: Violence Against Women Act is a true product of Washington’s swamp

Daily Beast: Why does Nanny-State California hate coffee so much?

And more on the bizarre story from Cato: California’s coffee chaos

FreeThoughtProject: Coincidence? Every time the US threatens to pull out of Syria, Assad uses chemical weapons

FEE: Could Amazon buy a country?

High Times: 5 over-the-counter medications that are more dangerous than weed

The Conversation: Best way to solve back pain? Lift heavy things