LA Times: Countless Americans are carrying guns. Police are killing too many of them.
Mises: George HW Bush’s wars set the stage for 25 years of endless war
Salt Lake Tribune: 2018 has been a deadly year for journalists
TAC: Think Eastern Europe is authoritarian? Try Germany and France.
Techdirt: New York court tells CBP agent he’s not allowed to pretend he’s a traffic cop
JEFFREY TUCKER: Regulators are not what makes food safe
PETER VAN BUREN: You don’t have to love Julian Assange to fear his prosecution
FEE: Harvard study shows the dangers of early school enrollment
Reason: Lawsuit alleges California cops stole weed and cash during traffic stops
The Intercept: U.S. military says it has a “light footprint” in Africa. These documents show a vast network of bases.
Reuters: Saudi Arabia inks deal for Lockheed’s missile defense system
Mises: The many ways governments create monopolies
High Times: Medicinal psilocybin initiative is one step closer to Oregon’s 2020 ballot
Futurism: Five U.S. sites are now enrolling patients for MDMA clinical trials
Activist Post: Meet IARPA: Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity
Reason: GM will shut down factory built on land seized in controversial 1981 Poletown taking
SingularityHub: Digital authoritarianism is rising. Here’s what that means.
And of course he will get away with it.
This time at an Alabama mall on Thanksgiving night. The legally-armed young man was gunned down by cop while fleeing his attackers.
By far the greatest factor that would affect my decision to carry a concealed weapon is how a cop would react when he found out. Some states require that police be immediately informed of the concealed weapon. How would the cop react in the moment? Would some primitive part of his brain coax him into taking this opportunity to commit murder, knowing he would get away scot-free?
There clearly must be an immediate reevaluation of the relationship between police and our Constitutional right to carry a self-defense weapon. More people than ever are exercising their right to carry a means of defense, and it is clear that many officers have no idea how to deal with it.
The Federalist: World War 1 was the beginning of America’s foolish foreign intervention habit
Also The Federalist: Amazon HQ will cost New Yorkers $61,000 per employee
TAC: Trump defends the indefensible in Yemen
Reason: UK anti-terrorism efforts are terrifying to anyone who favors free speech
FEE: Resisting the human impulse to make saints and witches Ed: I’ve always wondered what it is about us that compels us to either worship or burn others.
The Hill: Another decade lost to the global war on drugs
Techdirt: Court to law enforcement: You can’t seize a house for 15 hours before obtaining a warrant
Mises: Latin America has fewer guns, but more crime
VERONIQUE DE RUGY: A woman’s right to a free market
Antiwar.com: The case against Wikileaks is a crisis for the First Amendment. Ed: The First Amendment’s primary purpose is to protect speech criticizing the powerful. Non-controversial speech doesn’t require protection. It is the “controversial” criticism of every aspect of our rulers that requires robust protection, including Wikileaks. I’ve debated internally whether the First Amendment protections extends to instances of personal insults with the intent to provoke: example: walking up to someone’s wife and making lewd and vicious remarks about her. If you get knocked out, were your free speech rights violated? The First Amendment was consecrated at a time when duels were still fought over insults and slights, so I wonder how far the Founders believed the First Amendment truly extended. Disclaimer: I am not advocating for the return of the duel, and I am not advocating for physical violence.
A step toward liberty: OMMA approves more than 12,000 medical marijuana licenses
Kansas City Star: Medical marijuana or your gun? In Missouri, you’ll have to make a choice
FEE: How driverless cars will help Americans escape police oppression
The Guardian: “It can rewire people’s brains”: how traumatized veterans turned to underground MDMA therapy
Reason: Are the FDA’s E-cigarette restrictions legal?
Unz: Thanking vets for their “service”. Why?
Futurism: A super-spicy plant could help end the opioid crisis
Daily Mail: Why 536 AD was the worst year to be alive
GLENN GREENWALD: Prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing documents poses grave threat to press freedom
TAC: Rand Paul: Saudi Arabia is number one at spreading terror
The Week: The paranoid delusions behind America’s foreign policy
Also TAC: When the “good guy with a gun” is black Ed: There’s a good case to be made for taking guns away from cops. They have plenty of non-lethal options. And for those who didn’t hear much about the twist in the Trader Joe’s shooting, the employee was shot to death by a cop who fired wildly into the crowded grocery store in an attempt to kill the suspect.
And this from Techdirt: Appeals court: No immunity for shooting a man who had his hands up and twice said he surrendered
Mises: A White House press pass has nothing to do with the First Amendment
Reuters: Pentagon fails its first-ever audit
Reason: The postal service lost $3.9 billion last year
Quillette: The free speech crisis on campus is worse than you think
FEE: What the overpopulation pessimists got wrong (and still get wrong today) Ed: The overpopulation fear is so terrifying because it seems so plausible to those who don’t understand economies of scale, division of labor, and the revolutionary power of innovation. The latest Avengers film even attempted to humanize the villain Thanos by giving him supposedly benevolent intentions behind his desire to kill half the universe. Because the universe is too crowded. Of course. Hitler, of course, used the fear of an overpopulated Germany to gain support for the dehumanization. The true threat is the politicized fear of population growth.
Nooooooo: RIP William Goldman, creator of beloved film, The Princess Bride
National Interest: Veterans are not honored by forever war
DAVID FRENCH: Another police shooting raises hard questions about police restraint Ed: Bystanders allegedly began immediately yelling that the armed guard was, in fact, the person who saved the day, right when police arrived on the scene. The police killed Jemel anyway, despite his uniform with “security” branded right on the front, and also despite the fact that other cops were already on the scene, handling the situation like adults. What explains this other than systematically poor hiring practices, where the applicants selected are the ones most eager to kill someone? It reminds me of DiCaprio’s line in The Departed: “They signed up to use their weapons.” Being a cop in the U.S. today means having wide scope for murdering someone under the guise of, “He was reaching for his wasteband”, or “I feared for my life”.
Wall Street Journal: To make a cup of coffee, it takes more than a village
The Intercept: Google’s “smart city of surveillance” faces new resistance in Toronto
Techdirt: Nice work, EU: You’ve given Google an excuse to offer a censored search engine in China
Reason: HQ2: How Amazon made governments do their bidding for free
Also Reason: Stossel: Why some capitalists are the worst enemies of capitalism
Mises: The case against Pharma patent monopolies
TAC: Bolton uses WW1-era rhetoric to promote a cruel Iran policy
Forbes: Surging wealth inequality is a happy sign that life is becoming much more convenient
High Times: LA County sheriff’s deputy allegedly faked raid to rob cannabis facility
Activist Post: National facial recognition database to use loyalty rewards to identify American shoppers
Motherboard: It’s amateur hour in the world of spyware and victims will pay the price
Mises: The tragedy of America’s entry into World War 1
Antiwar.com: U.S. post-9/11 wars have killed 500,000 people, according new study out of Brown
Reason: The FDA plan to ban flavored E-cigarettes from most stores is unfair and dangerous
TAC: When “America First” becomes negotiable
The Week: How Saudi Arabia became America’s ally
FEE: F.A. Harper: The greatest threat to liberty is the idea that democracy guarantees freedom
Cato: The ACA’s pre-existing condition regulations lose support when public learns its cost
The Free Thought Project: Facebook is aiding the police state by purging police accountability pages
Activist Post: Tesla technology has been revived
News6: Tulsa medical marijuana dispensary runs out of stock on first day
The Hill: CIA’s ‘surveillance state’ is operating against us all
Techdirt: New York lawmakers want social media history to be included in gun background checks
Antiwar.com: Israel and the trillion-dollar 2005-2018 US intelligence budget
FEE: Venezuela reveals the natural progression of ‘democratic socialism’
Mises: How so many bad ideas manage to win on election day
High Times: California: One year after cannabis legalization
USA Today: FDA approves painkiller 1,000 times more powerful than morphine
RCS: Ripples in space-time could reveal the shape of wormholes