REPUBLIC REBORN

The Intercept: Government can spy on journalists in the U.S. by using invasive foreign intelligence process

ACLU: Some schools need a lesson on students’ free speech rights

Free Thought Project: Grandma allowed cops to search her garden for drug dealer and their K9 mauled her to death

Reason: Will World War 3 be fought by robots?

ROB FAUST: The expanding military blob

The Federalist: We need to know if intelligence agencies covered up the 1996 crash of TWA 800

Techdirt: State legislator says 11 year-old tased by cop deserved it and her parents probably suck

National Review: Nixing regulations saved taxpayers $1.3 billion this year

FEE: Why Congress must stop deferring its authority to the Executive branch

RYAN MCMAKEN: Capitalism makes us more humane

High Times: First ever trial to study the effects of microdosing LSD began this month

What. The. Heck? Popular Mechanics: FBI mysteriously close National Solar Observatory in New Mexico

The Intercept: Senior Google scientist resigns over “forfeiture of our values” in China

Techdirt: European Court of Human Rights: UK surveillance revealed by Snowden violates human rights

Activist Post: A brief history of repressive regimes and their gun laws

The Week: The case for the American bobby

National Review: Did France’s gun control hurt its resistance to the Nazis?

JIM BOVARD: Barack Obama’s return just reminds us how he fueled the distrust that led to Trump

JUSTIN RAIMONDO: Defeat the Deep State: “The Deep State – i.e. the constellation of national security agencies and private actors who have directed and maintained our globalist foreign policy since the end of World War II – would have targeted Trump in any case, due to his hostility to their interventionist foreign policy. And yet I believe they would’ve gone after him anyway due to his populist outsider persona, which the self-appointed guardians of the Empire consider dangerous per se.

The bottom line is that the intelligence services of the United States, and top officials of the FBI, have indeed launched a regime change operation comparable to the dozens carried out by these very same spooks over the years from Latin America to the Middle East. Like most of these campaigns, it’s a multilateral effort, with the intelligence services of at least three “allied” countries involved. Co-authored with the Clintonistas, the Russia-gate hoax is their invention: it was the perfect pretext to conduct surveillance on a rival presidential campaign. For all the talk of “collusion,” the real colluders were the Obama administration and the Clinton campaign organization who utilized the British “former” MI6 agent, Christopher Steele, and his infamous dossier. This fake intelligence was used by the Justice Department to justify spying on Carter Page, George Pappadapoulos, and other Trump campaign contacts.”

Reason: DHS gave ICE an extra $169 billion to detain and remove immigrants last month

Tulsa World: Cherokee Nation: Oklahoma’s medical marijuana law holds no weight on tribal lands

Public Radio Tulsa: Oklahoma Medical Marijuana Authority swamped with applications

The Federalist: America’s forever war in Afghanistan engulfs a new generation

Counterpunch: The original 9/11: 45 years after Pinochet’s coup

The Intercept: The U.S. goes to war against the ICC to cover up alleged war crimes in Afghanistan

High Times: Manhattan DA drops over 3,000 marijuana cases dating back to 1978

RYAN MCMAKEN: Cop Amber Guyger is one reason we need private gun ownership

Motherboard: The EU can still be saved from its internet-wrecking copyright plan

Techdirt: Couple gets back $10,000 seized by state trooper after local media starts asking questions

Reason: Watchdog sues to expose secret government kitten killing

DAVID FRENCH: The worst police shooting yet

The Federalist: U.K. police urge citizens to report neighbors for “offensive or insulting” speech

Vox: The TSA has a new program that could spy on you. It’s also a massive waste of money.

Reason: Classy: TSA uses 9/11 anniversary to debut new slogan

TAC: Washington quietly increases lethal weapons to Ukraine

Activist Post: Grand jury finds police were complicit in covering up massive child sex ring in Catholic church

JAMES BOVARD: Freedom frauds: Are we all terrorists, 17 years after 9/11?

New Republic: Why are drug users being charged with murder?

High Times: The anatomy of a marijuana plant

Comes from Shackle’s singular 1972 work, Epistemics and Economics: 

“If there is a fundamental conflict between the appeal to rationality and the consideration of the consequence of time as it imprisons us in actuality, the theoretician is confronted with a stark choice. He can reject rationality or time. The theory which rejects time has certain technical features, often referred to as, respectively, subjective marginalism, the market mechanism, and partial equilibrium…

…The other road consists in abandoning, not the word ‘time’, but its meaning of a forceps which grips us between the past which is unchoosable and the future which is unknowable.”

Shackle’s Orphic prose accurately captures the strangeness of our predicament. We are, in a sense, imprisoned by time. Despite that, our species moves through time and into an unknowable future and not only survives, but thrives. The strangeness stems from the fact that it shouldn’t be possible beyond the most basic of plans. Yet complex plans are carried out, economic calculations are accurately made, people are fed, clothed, housed, entertained, etc. And not in spite of the complexity of society, but because of it. The greatest attribute of our species is its ability to unwittingly generate vast cultural and social complexity as a way to solve the problems of time and ignorance.

Political Critique: A lawless zone: Surveillance technologies and the police

Techdirt: Officer who killed unarmed man now teaching officers how to go about the difficult business of being alive

Independent: US senator claims Britain’s MI6 is planning a fake chemical weapons attack in Syria

PAT BUCHANAN: Is Trump going full neocon in Syria?

Ars Technica: Mega-rich family behind opioid crisis has second, secret opioid company

Washington Post: Trump’s border wall threatens to end Texas family’s 250 years of ranching on the Rio Grande

High Times: Is Elon Musk’s government security clearance at risk from smoking pot? Personally, I’d prefer a government of potheads to the current situation.

Activist Post: Deadly fire exposes millionaire’s network of secret tunnels under Washington DC suburb

Reason: Court says school resource officers can’t arrest students just to prove a point

Also Reason: If you hate Ice Ages, thank a farmer

Truthdig: How Bill Clinton paved the way for Trump’s war on immigrants

News OK: A few Oklahoma doctors take the plunge on medical marijuana, but many wait

Ars Technica: NSA metadata program consistent with the Fourth Amendment, Kavanaugh once argued

The Verge: The Pentagon plans to spend $2 billion to put more artificial intelligence into weaponry

Gulf Today: Over 67,000 Yemenis either killed, injured, or kidnapped during past four years: Minister

FEE: Americans are leaving states with high tax rates, data show

RON PAUL: Can’t we just leave Syria alone?

The Week: Afghanistan, the endless war

The Intercept: Are New York’s free LinkNYC kiosks tracking your movements?

High Times: Hotels tap into projected $2.1 billion CBD market

Nassim Taleb on Saudi Arabia, from pages 106-107 of his book, Antifragility:

“So a place “allied” to the United States is a total monarchy, devoid of a constitution. But that is not what is morally shocking. A group of between seven and fifteen thousand members of the royal family runs the place, leading a lavish, hedonistic lifestyle in open contradiction with the purist ideas that got them there. Look at the contradiction: the stern desert tribes whose legitimacy is derived from Amish-like austerity can, thanks to a superpower, turn to hedonistic uninhibited pleasure-seeking: the king openly travels for pleasure with a retinue that fills four Jumbo jets. Quite a departure from his ancestors. The family members amassed a fortune now largely in Western safes. Without the United States, the country would have had its revolution, a regional breakup, some turmoil, then perhaps–by now–some stability. But preventing noise makes the problem worse in the long run.”

He may be stretching his analogies a bit too thin in places, generalizing them so as to apply them to a greater number of circumstances, but Taleb does point out the phenomenon of foreign aid creating political corruption in governments. A government is loyal to whoever writes the checks and delivers the guns. For a government to be somewhat accountable, both of those must come from the people they govern. It’s one reason I’ve always found the “tax the rich” policy argument strange: forcing the rich to pay the government more would serve only to more closely tie the rich to the government.

High Times: Study find marijuana use among Baby Boomer doubled in the past decade

RADLEY BALKO: “Cop of the Year” syndrome

FEE: All taxes undermine prosperity, but personal and income taxes do the most damage

Also FEE: The foreign war on drugs is failing, too

Reason: The TSA’s plastic screening trays are the dirtiest part of the airport

The Intercept: Dear anonymous Trump official, there is no redemption in your cowardly op-ed

NICK GILLESPIE: Anonymous tell-alls in the New York Times are more of a threat to the republic than Trump

DOUG BANDOW: John McCain leaves behind a hawkish void

AIER: The facts about immigration and crime

JUSTIN RAIMONDO: The hi-tech threat

Techdirt: Saudi government outlaws satire; violators to face five-year prison sentences

Astronomy.com: Saturn’s hexagon could be an enormous tower

Another from Taleb’s 2012 appropriately arrogant Antifragile, page 58-59:

“Our antifragilities have conditions. The frequency of stressors matters a bit. Humans tend to do better with acute than with chronic stressors, particularly when the former are followed by ample time for recovery, which allows the stressors to do their jobs as messengers. For instance, having an intense emotional shock from seeing a snake coming out of my keyboard or a vampire entering my room, followed by a period of soothing safety (with chamomile tea and baroque music) long enough for me to regain control of my emotions, would be beneficial for my health, provided of course that I manage to overcome the snake or vampire after an arduous, hopefully heroic fight and have a picture taken next to the dead predator. Such a stressor would be certainly better than the mild but continuous stress of a boss, mortgage, tax problems, guilt over procrastinating with one’s tax return, exam pressures, chores, emails to answer, forms to complete, daily commutes–things that make you feel trapped in life. In other words, the pressures brought about by civilization.In fact, neurobiologists show that the former type of stressor is necessary, the second harmful, for one’s health. For an idea of how harmful a low-level stressor without recovery can be, consider the so-called Chinese water torture: a drop continuously hitting the same spot on your head, never letting you recover.”

And a bonus nugget, and sentiment I can identify with, from page 63:

“If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead.”