REPUBLIC REBORN

WSWS: Pages purged by Facebook were on blacklist promoted by Washington Post

JIM BOVARD: Believe women: Apply the Christine Blasey Ford test to the TSA’s female victims

Counterpunch: The Saudi atrocities in Yemen are a worse story than the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi

Reason: Court: Police can’t shoot unlicensed dogs with impunity

Also Reason: The most badly behaved border agents are in Texas

The Nation: Cops usually get away with murder. What was different in Chicago?

Techdirt: A decade’s worth of meth convictions overturned due to drug lab employee’s misconduct

PAUL GOTTFRIED: Time to foreclose on the Churchill cult

National Review: Native Americans react to Elizabeth Warren’s DNA test Ed: She exploited a fraudulent minority status in order to easily glide into a Harvard professorship, Rachel Dolezal-fashion.

New York Times: Psychedelic mushrooms are closer to medicinal use

Defense News: America sold $55.6 billion in weapons abroad in FY18, a 33 percent jump

Activist Post: The purge is here: Hundreds of political social media pages deleted without warning

RAND PAUL: Stop military aid to Saudi Arabia

Reason: FDA threatens E-cigarette companies with product approval

The Intercept: Google CEO tells Senators that censored Chinese search engine could provide “broad benefits”

Reason: The $15 minimum wage is turning hard workers into black market lawbreakers

The Week: I smoke weed. I’m still a responsible parent.

High Times: Canada’s legal cannabis may pose challenges for police dogs

Techdirt: Report shows LA sheriff’s deputies engaging in biased policing, performing tons of questionable traffic stops

RYAN MCMAKEN: Yes, inequality is a problem…when caused by the government

Reason: Study: 80% of Americans believe political correctness is a problem

Also Reason: Washington State Supreme Court strikes down death penalty

Mises.org: Police fail to make arrests in nearly half of murder cases

NPR: Mexico’s morgues are overflowing as its murder rate rises

TruthOut: Civilian deaths in Yemen increased by 164 percent. Will Congress act?

The Week: The Saudi-US alliance must end

JUSTIN RAIMONDO: Goodbye and good riddance, Nikki Haley

The Intercept: At largest ICE detention center in the country, guards called attempted suicides “failures”

Reason: US prisons held at least 61,000 inmates in solitary confinement last year

Techdirt: NY legislators introduce bill that would seriously curb law enforcement’s surveillance collections

High Times: Denver’s psilocybin initiative moves forward to signature-gathering phase Ed: The burgeoning awareness and acceptance of cannabis and psychedelics by the culture at large is an indication that we are on the verge of a revolution in wellness, mental health, and the very definition of ‘medicine’. The pharmaceutical industry is already extinct, it just doesn’t yet know it.

IFJ PAN: Where is the foundation of quantum reality?

National Review: Is the tide turning toward justice for police-shooting victims?

RYAN MCMAKEN: New data shows Federal Reserve is causing more inequality

The Intercept: Leaked transcript of private meeting contradicts Google’s official story on China

TAC: The Pentagon: Incompetent on cybersecurity

Military.com: Army to revamp recruiting strategy after missing yearly goal Ed: Prepare for even more aggressive salesmen in your kids’ public schools and college campuses selling the “Join the Empire! See the world!” crap. Military recruiters are pure garbage, and they will tell your children anything at all in order to trick them into signing their future away, destroying it in some unnecessary conflict on the other side of the planet.

Electronic Intifada: Dutch supplier of Israeli attack dogs compensates Palestinian victim

FEE: How Trump’s trade policies make us more like a banana republic

National Interest: No, Mr. President, war against Venezuela is a bad idea

DON BOUDREAUX: The best trade policy is to ignore other governments’ trade policies

Fortune: Walmart might start selling cannabis products in Canada

High Times: Recent study reveals anti-anxiety effects of ketamine may alter theta brainwaves

MIT Tech Review: The 8-dimensional space that must be searched for alien life

Weed News: Oklahoma City Council approves cite-and-release marijuana ordinance

Reason: Judge rules against pregnant woman mauled by police dog because she wasn’t the intended target

BONNIE KRISTIAN: Staying in Syria is a good way to get into a bad war with Iran

FEE: Compulsory schooling laws: What if we didn’t have them?

PETER VAN BUREN: Democrats die again on the wrong hill

WSWS: CIA Democrats call for aggression against Russia, run pro-war campaigns in 2018 congressional races

UN peacekeeper held over alleged sexual abuse of minors

Motherboard: Scientists fear DARPA’s ‘insect allies’ will attack global food supply with viruses

Inverse: Why psychedelics researchers are calling for open science of LSD, magic mushrooms

Nautilus: Researchers create ‘quantum artificial life’ for the first time

The Verge: A one-word Turing test suggests ‘poop’ is what sets us apart from the machines

Reason: Google and privatized authoritarianism

High Times: FBI data shows cannabis arrests are on the rise for second year in a row

FEE: The New York Times explains why the minimum wage should be $0

Antiwar.com: Yemen civilian deaths skyrocketing since June

SHIKHA DALMIA: The weaponization of Milton Friedman

Rolling Stone: Study: MDMA could help autistic adults with social anxiety

Forbes: The computer that almost started a nuclear war

Reason: A father defends his daughter with a shotgun when cops break into the wrong house

Techdirt: Hell forms bobsled team after police chief admits fault in SWAT raid targeting wrong address

The Week: Wall Street’s reefer madness

High Times: Epileptic 5-year old may now bring cannabis-based medicine to school

TAC: Trump puts arms sales above Yemeni lives

The Intercept: Google suppresses memo revealing plans to closely track search users in China

FEE: How the housing crisis vindicated the Austrian School of Economics

RON PAUL: Republicans’ responsibility for socialism’s comeback

The Federalist: Why insider trading shouldn’t be illegal

Techdirt: California police officers used self-destructing messaging app for years

RCP: War on vaping threatens public health

High Times: Canada estimates $1 billion in cannabis sales in the first three months

GRACY OLMSTEAD: We weren’t made for endless work: “It is easy to slip into distractedness and inattentiveness if we are not cultivating daily rhythms that emphasize the present and the real over the possible and the virtual. That’s why Sherry Turkle suggests that we carve out “sacred spaces” in our day in which we set aside our devices and seek to truly focus on each other. The dinner table is a good space for this—but I also feel that I could do a better job abandoning my devices for intentional daily spurts of play with my daughter. Otherwise, leisure is too quickly interrupted by a text or email or phone call.

We don’t always like to hear that rest and “play” can nourish our souls. Owning up to that truth would require slowing down and doing “unimportant” things with no material, measurable benefit. It would require acknowledging our need for grace, and our own inability to accept the world as gift. But our existence was never meant to fixate around work—at least not if the ancients are to be believed. Leisure makes us human.

So go on a walk tomorrow and search for “tiny perfect things.” Play a board game after the dinner dishes are put away. Read a favorite book aloud. Pull out the sidewalk chalk.”

FreedomPress: Revealed: The Justice Department’s secret rules for targeting journalists with FISA court orders

Techdirt: State cops accidentally out their surveillance of anti-police groups with browser screenshot

New York Times: Trump has it backward: Many migrants are victims of crimes

FEE: How a minimum wage hike wiped out 40% of Venezuela’s stores

Forbes: America ‘one of 45 countries’ infected by super-powerful Israeli smartphone spyware

Mondoweiss: Israel says it is “entitled to violate the sovereignty of foreign countries”

DOUG BANDOW: Washington’s endless sanctions are finally backfiring

The Federalist: Google turns evil in willingness to collude with China’s repression

National Interest: Assad has won and America must go

High Times: What do the colors of marijuana mean?

Ars Technica: Quantum mechanics can’t handle quantum observers that know quantum mechanics

A quote that I’m sure I’ve posted before, from his 1939 essay, published in Mencken’s American Mercury, Albert Jay Nock’s The Criminality of the State: 

“The weaker the State is, the less power it has to commit crime. Where in Europe today does the State have the best criminal record? Where it is weakest: in Switzerland, Holland, Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, Sweden, Monaco, Andorra. Yet when the Dutch State, for instance, was strong, its criminality was appalling; in Java it massacred 9000 persons in one morning which is considerably ahead of Hitler’s record or Stalin’s. It would not do the like today, for it could not; the Dutch people do not give it that much power, and would not stand for such conduct. When the Swedish State was a great empire, its record, say from 1660 to 1670, was fearful. What does all this mean but that if you do not want the State to act like a criminal, you must disarm it as you would a criminal; you must keep it weak. The State will always be criminal in proportion to its strength; a weak State will always be as criminal as it can be, or dare be, but if it is kept down to the proper limit of weakness – which, by the way, is a vast deal lower limit than people are led to believe – its criminality may be safely got on with.

So it strikes me that instead of sweating blood over the iniquity of foreign States, my fellow-citizens would do a great deal better by themselves to make sure that the American State is not strong enough to carry out the like iniquities here. The stronger the American State is allowed to grow, the higher its record of criminality will grow, according to its opportunities and temptations. If, then, instead of devoting energy, time, and money to warding off wholly imaginary and fanciful dangers from criminals thousands of miles away, our people turn their patriotic fervor loose on the only source from which danger can proceed, they will be doing their full duty by their country.”