REPUBLIC REBORN

Is from the greatest self-help book ever written, Steve Pressfield’s The War of Art: 

“Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance. Have you ever brought home a treadmill and let it gather dust in the attic? Ever quit a diet, a course of yoga, a meditation practice? Have you ever bailed out on a call to embark upon a spiritual practice, dedicate yourself to a humanitarian calling, commit your life to the service of others? Have you ever wanted to be a mother, a doctor, an advocate for the weak and helpless; to run for office, crusade for the planet, campaign for world peace, or to preserve the environment? Late at night have you experienced a vision of the person you might become, the work you could accomplish, the realized being you were meant to be? Are you a writer who doesn’t write, a painter who doesn’t paint, an entrepreneur who never starts a venture? Then you know what Resistance is. 

Resistance is the most toxic force on the planet. It is the root of more unhappiness than poverty, disease, and erectile dysfunction. To yield to Resistance deforms our spirit. It stunts us and makes us less than we are and were born to be. If you believe in God (and I do) you must declare Resistance evil, for it prevents us from achieving the life God intended when He endowed each of us with our own unique genius. Genius is a Latin word; the Romans used it to denote an inner spirit, holy and inviolable, which watches over us, guiding us to our calling. A writer writes with his genius; an artist paints with hers; everyone who creates operates from this sacramental center. It is our soul’s seat, the vessel that holds our being-in-potential, our star’s beacon and Polaris. 

Every sun casts a shadow, and genius’s shadow is Resistance. As powerful as is our soul’s call to realization, so potent are the forces of Resistance arrayed against it. Resistance is faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, harder to kick than crack cocaine. We’re not alone if we’ve been mowed down by Resistance; millions of good men and women have bitten the dust before us.”

I came across this book around the Fall of 2014, and it basically shamed me into submitting writing samples to various publishing outlets. I couldn’t bear to have read Pressfield’s book and not taken my own leap of faith. I’m glad I did, because it led to several years of published material across several popular news and opinion sites. It made me realize that, not only could I write, but I could write what others wanted to read. An amazing thing also happened: I stopped caring about anyone’s opinion of my writing. I only cared what I thought of the final product, my internal critic mattered far more than the squabblers in the comments’ sections. There is a thrill to taking leaps like that, it can’t be described. You just have to feel it for yourself. That period of my life was one such time.

Reuters: U.S. gov’t seeks to force Facebook to allow surveillance of Messenger

The Intercept: Google executives misled staff in meeting on China censorship. Here are 13 questions they must answer.

Antiwar.com: No surprise. Bomb that killed over 40 Yemen schoolchildren was supplied by the U.S.

GEORGE WILL: The sprawling, intrusive, administrative state is keeping you unwell

FEE: Thanos, like Malthus, is wrong about population control

JACK HUNTER: What if Russiagate is the new WMDs?

The Federalist: Debunking socialist myths: 90 percent of Scandinavia’s wealth is privately owned

Spectator: The return of Rand Paul

Daily Beast: Last battle of the Vietnam war: Agent Orange and its “presumed diseases”

Axios: Tech’s most egregious violations of user privacy

Business Insider: Psychedelic drugs are making a medical comeback over 50 years after their research heyday

KFOR: Oklahoma agency urges judge not to block new marijuana law

ACLU: Here’s what happens when we allow facial recognition technology into our schools

Mint Press News: TSA defends Orwellian secretive surveillance program

Engadget: Los Angeles will be the first US city to use subway body scanners

Reason: New CDC numbers show the drug war continues to make opioids deadlier

National Review: Colorado defies Supreme Court, renews persecution of Masterpiece Cakeshop baker

BONNIE KRISTIAN: Let Korea fix Korea

Mises: Why the quota system is one of the worst ways of regulating immigration

FEE: Why the Pledge of Allegiance is un-American

KOCO: Yukon, Oklahoma could be sued if city council passes medical marijuana ordinance, attorney says

LA Times: Marijuana isn’t really legal in California if residents don’t have a reasonable way to buy it

Inverse: Now we understand how marijuana makes inflammatory bowel disease bearable

Well, you can apparently make cannabis extract with just a personal espresso machine

Rolling Stone: Matt Taibbi: Censorship does not end well

Gizmodo: Australia hopes to strong-arm tech companies into giving up that precious encrypted data

FEE: Escape from New York: Big Government is chasing away the small businesses it doesn’t kill first

National Interest: Israel is not a liberal democracy

PAT BUCHANAN: America’s lengthening enemies list

Washington Examiner: Abolish the census

National Review: Race hustlers: Corey Stewart and Al Sharpton Ed: Unfortunately, it’s been a pretty good market lately for race hustlers on both the Left and the Right.

The American Conservative‘s Daniel Larison has been one of the few journalists I’ve come across that covers the US-funded, Saudi-led slaughter of one of the poorest countries in the Middle East, Yemen. His almost daily posts detail the latest atrocity, and he always points out where the guns, bombs, jets, and gold are coming from. His latest, The U.S. Enables and Indulges Saudi War Crimes, is straight to the point. A Saudi coalition airstrike targeted a bus of schoolchildren in a crowded marketplace in Saada, Yemen. 51 people were killed, 40 of them children. To understand this from an American standpoint, imagine an alternate universe where China were funding some authoritarian religious autarch in Mexico. This autarch wants to suppress some disagreeable political shift in the U.S. that is gaining support and power. So China funds a Mexican campaign of terror against civilians and “supporters” of this new political movement. It begins starving and murdering American citizens by the thousands. It’s a question of, how would you feel about all this? If Mexico were bombing schools, WalMarts, churches, and buses, how would you feel?  That’s what Yemen feels, because that nightmare is a reality for them. And the world, for the most part, doesn’t appear to even care.

The morning of 9/11/01, everyone in my school piled into the commons area and watched the coverage of the attacks, with everyone wondering why anyone would do such a horrible thing. Several borderline thug coaches, who for some reason also taught classes at the middle school, emotionally claimed that the U.S. should nuke the Middle East. Everyone called the attacks an act of cowardice, which they were. But they were also attacks of revenge.  We were attacked because our government attacks their countries, funds their enemies, kills their families. And it wasn’t some secret that our government did this. It wasn’t covered by CNN or Fox, but it was public record that our government bombed, starved, and occupied Middle Eastern kingdoms, paying off the tinpot dictators, but all the while fueling the hatred of the citizens.  It’s not that it wasn’t known, but that no one cared what their government did overseas.

Terrorism is an act of desperation from a people that see that their own government is not only ineffectual, but partly responsible for their situation.  The slaughter of Yemen’s poor by the country on the receiving end of the largest arms deal in history has sown dragon’s teeth. In five, ten, or twenty years, Americans might die in an act of terror, and the survivors will say that their attackers repeatedly screamed incoherently about ‘Yemen’.

Common Dreams: With merger pending, Bayer shares plunge after court orders Monsanto to pay $289 million to cancer victim

Activist Post: How Google still tracks you even when ‘location history’ is turned off

Techdirt: Court tells government it can’t search a house just because a suspected drug dealer once parked in its driveway

National Review: Ninth Circuit returns to form, upholds bizarre California gun regulation

Reason: Body camera shows school resource officer handcuffing autistic 10-year-old

Motherboard: The internet is crowdfunding the release of 4,358 secret CIA mind-control documents

Electronic Intifada: Israel destroys Gaza cultural center

PHILIP GIRALDI: Why confronting Israel is important

FEE: How the term ‘social justice warrior’ became an insult

JUSTIN RAIMONDO: Rand Paul stands up for peace

JIM BOVARD: Pathetic Unite the Right and angry Antifa sputter. There’s still time to heed Rodney King.

Re-posting an essential bit of wisdom from page 56 of Hayek’s Law, Legislation, and Liberty:

“From the insight that the benefits of civilization rest on the use of more knowledge than can be used in any deliberately concerted effort, it follows that it is not in our power to build a desirable society by simply putting together the particular elements that by themselves appear desirable. Although probably all beneficial improvement must be piecemeal, if the separate steps are not guided by a body of coherent principles, the outcome is likely to be a suppression of individual freedom.

The reason for this is very simple, although not generally understood. Since the value of freedom rests on the opportunities it provides for unforeseen and unpredictable actions, we will rarely know what we lose through a particular restriction of freedom. Any such restriction, any coercion other than the enforcement of general rules, will aim at the achievement of some foreseeable particular result, but what is prevented by it will usually not be known. The direct effects of any interference with the market order will be near and clearly visible in most cases, while the more indirect and remote effects will mostly be unknown and will therefore be disregarded. We shall never be aware of all the costs of achieving particular results by such interference.

And so, when we decide each issue solely on what appear to be its individual merits, we always over-estimate the advantages of central direction. Our choice will regularly appear to be one between a certain known and tangible gain and the mere probability of the prevention of some unknown beneficial action by unknown persons.”

KFOR: Next meeting for medical marijuana task force will include presentations from law enforcement

The American Conservative: Throwing children away: The school-to-prison pipeline Ed: Essential reading for parents. The “school cop” trend is alarming, cops have no place near our children. A highly-trained security guard from a private firm, who stays far away from the kids themselves? Maybe. But no one hiding behind the corrupting power that a badge confers belongs near children.

Trump’s $400 billion weapons sale to Saudi Arabia is the biggest arms deal in history

Reason: American aluminum manufacturer seeks relief from tariffs meant to help American aluminum manufacturers

The Free Thought Project: UPS workers inadvertently make instructions on how police should deal with dogs WITHOUT killing them

Activist Post: The Idiot’s Guide to the Internet of Things: With an almost 75% failure rate, security experts suggest only idiots would want to hook up every appliance to the internet

FEE: Which countries have the best record in protecting property rights?

Civilized: “I’m not joking when I say medical marijuana is like a miracle”: multiple sclerosis patient

WSWS: America’s unending reign of police terror

NewsOK: University of Oklahoma, Oklahoma State ban medical marijuana

Fox25: Students react to campus ban of medical marijuana

Marijuana Business Daily: Signatures submitted for Oklahoma recreational marijuana ballot measure

High Times: Study finds workplace fatalities dropped in states with medical marijuana

Fast Company: This powerful new “face search” engine could be a privacy nightmare

Consortium News: In a corporatist system of government, corporate censorship is state censorship

The Intercept: Google censorship plan is “not right”, “stupid”, says former Google head of free expression

Also The Intercept: Secret Israeli report reveals armed drone killed four boys playing on Gaza beach in 2014

Zero Hedge: “Serious incident” unfolds as NATO jet accidentally launches secret missile near Russian border

WILL PORTER: Iran sanctions aren’t just counterproductive, they’re an act of war

Reason: Trade war stranded huge ship full of American soy beans at sea

FEE: 5 of the worst economic predictions in history

The Daily Bell: How 3D printing is revolutionizing the housing Ed: Print a Queen Anne and I’ll be sold.

Parents get hit with tough questions out of the blue on a daily basis, and I’m no exception. I’m also fairly inarticulate in my answers, and my explanation of the origin of money to two young children with finely tuned BS detectors went over about as well as an earlier explanation of how birds evolved from a certain class of dinosaurs. Thankfully, YouTube has plenty of videos to clarify the latter. It is fascinating how naturally we are predisposed to ‘intelligent design’ theories of everything around us. That includes not only the natural world, but also the social. The answers to “Who invented money?” and “who created birds?” are very similar, in the sense that the answer lies in a process of evolution over a period of time. No one invented money, no one invented language, no one invented prices, and no one coordinates the vast, richly intertwined kaleidic social world that ebbs, flows, and constantly changes. It coordinates itself without ever being aware of it. Or rather, the daily choices we make as we go about our lives contributes in unknown ways to that social organism, which then assimilates and transmits that data. But our choices are made based on data that comprises the choices of everyone else within the social web. This social world is an endless transmutation, emerging from and acting on a just few fundamental rules.  There is nothing to measure or quantify. Money, raw liquidity in physical form, emerged as a result of the kaleidic evolution of collective choice. No one planned it, no one created it.

What economists study is choice made in the face of not merely scarcity, and not merely the data produced by the invisible social web that comprises all other choice-making actors, but also their own imagination of what the future holds. There is no ‘creation’, and can be no ‘Creator’ in social life, something that ‘socialists’ must urgently realize. Intelligent Design theories of economics culminate in the belief that the social sphere can be centrally planned. It can’t, as the entire 20th century attests to. Venezuela is currently providing laboratory conditions for how society rips itself apart when an authoritarian attempts to control it.

Kaleidic change is the fundamental characteristic of evolution, both in the natural world as well as in the social.  This matters for proponents of liberty because the essence of libertarianism is an openness to all change that emerges from what Hayek dubbed the ‘spontaneous forces’. Whatever emerges from the collective voluntary, unrestrained actions of billions of people, we accept.  We defend the process, not the outcomes.

That’s not quite what I relayed to my children.