REPUBLIC REBORN

TomDispatch: Pentagon socialism

The Federalist: 9 years into Common Core, test scores are down, indoctrination up

TAC: The mad rush to college is killing our children’s entrepreneurial spirit: “Entrepreneurship, of course, requires time devoted to imagining and dreaming—time today’s students simply don’t have. Many spend every minute trying to build a résumé that will usher them into the best colleges. In The Coddling of the American Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and former Foundation for Individual Rights in Education president Greg Lukianoff argue that, for the last two decades, parents have overscheduled their children to their detriment. To make sure college applications shine, they fill up kids’ time with supervised activities, eroding the hours they need to enjoy playing and simply being young. When you have school, then piano recital, then soccer practice, then choir, then homework, then bed, it’s tough to find time to go skateboarding with your friends. That isn’t a good thing.”

FEE: Stop shaming people who don’t vote Ed: The sheer amount of sanctimoniousness, ignorance, and schoolmarmishness over voting today has been ridiculous. Do these people actually care about ending war? About reducing the prison population? About making everyone’s lives easier and more free? Not at all. The sole issue they care about is that their team wins the game.

Oh HO HO: America’s wars are a non-factor in today’s midterm elections Ed: The vulgar preening over having voted, and ensuring that everyone knew the deed had taken place, reaches absurd levels among the high-income crowd in Norman, as I quickly found out today. There seems to have been an unspoken contest to see who could place their comically lame “I Voted!” sticker as close to their face as possible, without it actually touching. I’m surprised that some of these people don’t actually place it on their forehead, or right between their eyes. “Oh, you voted huh?” “Yes! It’s the most important election in our lifetimes!”, responds someone long past the age where they should know better than to actually believe it. Engaging in mindless conspicuous consumption is apparently next on their list after engaging in their equally mindless act in the voting booth, and my place of employment could not be a more perfect destination. As I take their cash, I idly wish another group of Porsche Cayenne-driving Baby Boomers would breeze in through the door, high on the fumes of counterfeit democracy, and engage the current customers in some meaningless-yet-heated political discussion, quickly devolving into a primitive slap-fight among the elders of two warring tribes. It would almost make voting worth it.

I do not understand the compulsion to make oneself into a flying monkey for a political party, but for the vast majority it appears to be high on the list of basic human instincts.

Now HERE is some real news: MDMA therapy eliminated PTSD in 76% of patients. Ed: This is news worthy of coverage and disk space in your brain, not the meaningless midterms. Psychedelics are a pharmaceutical and mental health revolution in utero. The pharmaceutical industry will cease to exist in its current form once these compounds are made widely and easily available.

Reason: Missouri becomes 32nd medical marijuana state

EFF: Spot the surveillance: A VR experience for keeping an eye on Big Brother

TAC: Jeff Bezos put the Pentagon on his Monopoly board

Common Dreams: Veterans call on active-duty troops to refuse orders to deploy to the border

Consortium News: Break-in attempted at Assange’s residence in Ecuador Embassy

The Federalist: China developing world’s most massive population surveillance system

JUSTIN RAIMONDO: Whatever happened to the Russia-gate scandal?

FEE: Not too big to fail: Why Facebook’s long reign may be coming to an end

High Times: Psychedelic use linked to increased well-being, says pioneering study

CERN: New anti-gravity experiments begin at CERN

The Intercept: Weapons makers rushing campaign cash to Democrat in line to chair defense industry’s key house committee

Reuters: UNICEF: Yemeni children die as warring sides block aid deliveries

Reason: It’s not just one bad apple. Little Rock’s police department is rotten throughout. Ed: Too many cops with what I like to think of as the ‘Barney Fife thinks he’s the Punisher’ syndrome.

FEE: Why the hammer and sickle should be treated like the swastika Ed: It is stupefying that this is not the case. Support for communism/socialism is commonplace, despite a far bloodier record than the Nazi reign.

Cato: Walling off liberty: How strict immigration enforcement threatens privacy and local policing.

ART CARDEN: Are we serious about reducing poverty? Then we need to welcome immigrants

Truthdig: The U.S. military’s empire of secrecy

Activist Post: CIA secretly intercepted Congressional communications about whistleblowers

The Guardian: Weed woes: Canada struggles to meet huge demand for legal cannabis

Motherboard: Pentagon wants to predict anti-Trump protests using social media surveillance

Reason: Despite $900 billion and 2,400 U.S. lives lost, Afghanistan continues to deteriorate Ed: Winning isn’t the goal. Perpetuating the conflict is.

TAC: The costly and irrational Iran obsession

Also Reason: Massachusetts cop charged with kicking Latino teen, spitting on him, saying: “Welcome to the white man’s world”

Washington Examiner: Trump is in denial about the effect of his tariffs

High Times: Mexican Supreme Court declares prohibition of recreational weed unconstitutional

Stars and Stripes: Long trip: Psychedelic advocate nears goal of legal ecstasy

FEE: Stanford dean: 8 basic skills we’re failing to teach young people

JIM BOVARD: We need a #MeToo movement for political consent

The Week: What does a ghost smell like? 

Big Think: Why the number 137 is one of the greatest mysteries in physics

Gizmodo: Why a mission to a visiting interstellar object could be our best bet for finding aliens

SingularityHub: De-extinction is now a thing–starting with passenger pigeons

Republic Reborn is back. And it’s rebirth surely calls for a lengthy, meandering, digressing blog post only tangentially related to the ongoing purpose of this website, in lieu of a shorter, more tightly-written, yet less satisfying series of articles. Of course it does.

I cannot remember a more blustery, rainy, or cold October than this one. It has been glorious, and has provided the perfect backdrop for immersion into Lovecraft, Derleth, one of the Bronte sisters, the obligatory rereading of Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, and new favorite poet, Clark Ashton Smith.

Aside from the diet of gothic and cosmic horror that so perfectly fits into October, I’ve been held in thrall by books I’ve normally considered “summer” reads: the first four novels of Frank Herbert’s Dune series.  Arrakis, or Dune, a desert planet devoid of rainfall, ochre sunsets, the landscape ravaged by the coriolis wind of massive sandstorms, mile-long sandworms that glide under the dunes, the Spartan-esque Fremen natives who thrive there, and, of course, the ‘spice’, the creation of the sandworm life cycle, coveted by the entire universe for its prescience-bestowing qualities that allow for faster-than-light travel, among other qualities that you will just have to read the books to discover.

The world that Herbert created is fascinating, the complexity is such that it seems impossible to have come from just one imagination. A slightly overused trope running through much of science fiction is the ‘War against the Machines’, a la Terminator, The Matrix, Battlestar Galactica, etc. It’s ubiquitous, and Dune is no different, in a sense, excepting the fact that, in Herbert’s universe, humanity had fought and won it’s war against the “thinking machines” millennia before the events of the first book. What is astonishing is that Dune was published in 1966, long before much of the ‘man versus machine’ genre really took off, or even before the potential of artificial intelligence really came into view. Herbert built a universe around the question of what safeguards would the human race put into place in order to prevent another rise of artificial intelligence. One of these is the publication, dissemination, and enforcement of the teachings of the Orange Catholic Bible, the most fundamental lesson of which is contained in the phrase, “Thou shalt not make a machine in the image of a man’s mind”. 

The commandment is pregnant with meaning and weight, and you don’t even really need a novel to understand the amount of blood and war it took for the human race to rebuild anew on top of such a commandment.

Looking at our world today, it appears the fundamental goal of technological progress is to produce such a machine intelligence as soon as possible. What is it in us that drives our species toward such a creation? I’ve recently wondered what latent instincts we are unconsciously playing out over the centuries. Spiders weave webs, beavers build dams, and we work to create our successors. But I digress.

My fascination with Dune is closely connected to the story of T.E. Lawrence, and his adventures in Arabia during World War 1. Aside from the enigma of Arabs giving their allegiance and lives to a 5’2″, 27-year old, white Englishman, and what qualities those Arabs saw in Lawrence that made them disregard everything else, Dune mirrors Lawrence in the fictional character of Paul Atreides, a young outworlder who came to embody the Messiah of Fremen prophecy, leading the Fremen off Dune, and into the universe, with devastating consequences.

Our civilization is rapidly moving to a point nestled somewhere in the unknown future, where we will have to grapple with the question of whether it is wise to build machines “in the image of a man’s mind”.  Automation of every aspect of our lives is a virtual certainty within the next few decades, but what price will it exact in terms of our humanity? The diversion of technological progress into machines that think for us, easing us into a comfortable, mental torpidity that will rob us of our ability to even enjoy life. The very dis-utility of thinking, of grappling with the theoretical, exercising the imagination and apprehending the elliptical, is being bargained away in a strangely Faustian situation where we give away that which makes us most human, our ability to think, in exchange for a passive existence, a freedom from thinking, which is exactly what is being sold by Silicon Valley. What is promised, and what, apparently, is being clamoured for by the culture at large, freedom from thinking, is being given at the price of every other freedom you possess as an individual. A digital Panopticon that would make Bentham blush is being constructed around us, emulsifying our ever-dulling minds in a passive, waking-dream.

As the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood reminds us in Dune, after the war with the machines, mankind had to relearn how to think. The mind was given top priority as something to be improved, not crippled with the easy slavery that thinking machines gave it. Mentats became ‘human computers’, mental disciplines were designed and adhered to with a seriousness and devotion traditionally given to the martial arts.

The lesson of Dune is a warning to our current situation: to regain our freedom, we must relearn how to think.

RON PAUL: Liberty is still popular

Defense One: The Pentagon is getting more secretive–and it’s hurting national security

Unz: The Yemen war death toll is five times higher than we think

Counterpunch: The Saudi blueprint: Arms sales and assassinations

TAC: The other murderous Gulf monarchy

FEE: Greece, prostitution, and the sad consequences of democratic socialism

Fast Company: Big Brother is being increasingly outsourced to Silicon Valley, says report

Mashable: Police trial of Amazon facial recognition tech doesn’t seem to be going very well

GovTech: Amazon pitches its facial recognition AI to ICE

Gizmodo: Google pledges $25 million for ‘good’ AI, totally isn’t trying to make you forget about that military AI stuff

Filter: Brazil heading for even deadlier drug war after election of president Jair Bolsonaro

Techdirt: Court tells deputy he can’t lie about reasons for a traffic stop and expect to keep his evidence

TruthDig: A glimpse into the US Warfare State abyss

Antiwar.com: US airstrike kills family of five on Syrian border

JUSTIN RAIMONDO: Lightening skies: The case for optimism

High Times: World’s first trial to treat brain cancer with medical cannabis is about to start

Mises: Deficits do matter: Debt payments will consume trillions of dollars in coming years

EFF: Corporate speech police are not the answer to online hate

War On The Rocks: The US-Saudi alliance was in trouble long before Jamal Khashoggi’s murder

Forbes: Why we should fear China’s emerging high-tech Surveillance State

KEVIN WILLIAMSON: Rage makes you stupid

PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS: The triumph of evil

Ars Technica: Gut bacteria recover from antibiotics, but they may take six months

Techdirt: Appeals court judge tears into ATF’s life-wrecking, discriminatory stash house stings

Consortium News: Wikileaks’ legacy of exposing US-UK complicity

Reason: European court: Woman’s criticism of Mohammed doesn’t count as free expression

The American Conservative: Google wants to be your media mommy

Truthdig: The sinister reason the U.S. persists in waging unwinnable wars

Activist Post: Parents given nearly $5 million after officers ignored teen daughter as she died in jail

The Federalist: How public schools indoctrinate kids without almost anyone noticing

FEE: How the U.S. government led a program that forcibly sterilized thousands of poor Peruvian women in the 1990s

Reason: FDA recognizes psilocybin as ‘breakthrough therapy’ for depression

High Times: The yin and yang of pot: Why CBD oil and THC are better together

Motherboard: Physicists discover how an exotic form of ice grows at over 1,000 miles per hour

The Federalist: No, the world wouldn’t be better off with fewer African children. Ed: The murderous, and discredited, population-bomb theories are being aggressively promoted by the “humanitarian” foundations of foolish billionaires. Prosperity always and everywhere far outstrips population growth when markets are allowed to operate.

BBC: Cannabis in Canada: How it went down on Legalization Day

Antiwar.com: Why did an American hit squad kill politicians in Yemen?

TAC: Forgotten FBI anti-terrorism entrapment debacles

Also TAC: Thanks to government, that road sign might be watching you

Reason: Congress needs an opioid intervention

Techdirt: Mississippi law enforcement performed $200,000 worth of illegal forfeitures because it ‘didn’t realize law had changed’

FEE: Young voters are warming to socialism because they don’t know its history

The Intercept: Why Israel’s, and America’s, legal justifications for assassinations don’t add up

Antiwar.com: Saudis dismembered journalist while he was still alive, according to audio recording

Reason: The Saudis need us, not the other way around

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Jobs are no excuse for arming a murderous regime

Truthdig: What keeps Washington indefinitely in bed with Riyadh

Washington Post: Sears’ radical past: How mail-order catalogues subverted the racial hierarchy of Jim Crow 

NOVA: When addiction starts at the dentist

FEE: Facial recognition scanning in schools has arrived

The Federalist: The five most important guns in American history

Futurism: Meet the researchers bringing bizarre AI creations to life

High Times: Rhode Island approves medical marijuana treatment for autism