REPUBLIC REBORN

Raw Story: Oklahoma health department puts 75 pages of regulations on medical marijuana that voters didn’t approve

KFOR: ACLU of Oklahoma threatens lawsuit over newly-adopted marijuana rules

KXII: Medical marijuana law to affect gun owners in Oklahoma

The Verge: California malls have been feeding license plate data to a national network linked with ICE

VICE: Surveillance and the City: Know when you’re being watched

TechCrunch: Court victory legalizes 3D-printable gun blueprints

Reason: Trump pardons Oregon ranchers convicted in brush fire case

National Interest: The US mission in Afghanistan is not making us safer. It’s time to bring it to an end.

Mises: The Supreme Court is much too powerful

Techdirt: Fake news is a meaningless term, and our obsession with it continues to harm actual news

The Week: Trump’s corporate servility

Moore’s Law is back: Ars Technica: The AI revolution has sparked a new chips arms race

From Chapter 3 of his important, and vastly underread, The Constitution of Liberty, and what I consider the greatest concise defense of liberty:

“Man learns by the disappointment of expectations. Needless to say, we ought not to increase the unpredictability of events by foolish human institutions. So far as possible, our aim should be to improve human institutions so as to increase the chances of correct foresight. Above all, however, we should provide the maximum of opportunity for unknown individuals to learn of facts that we ourselves are yet unaware of and to make use of this knowledge in their actions.

It is through the mutually adjusted efforts of many people that more knowledge is utilized than any one individual possesses or than it is possible to synthesize intellectually; and it is through such utilization of dispersed knowledge that achievements are made possible greater than any single mind can foresee. It is because freedom means the renunciation of direct control of individual efforts that a free society can make use of so much more knowledge than the mind of the wisest ruler could comprehend.

From this foundation of the argument for liberty it follows that we shall not achieve its ends if we confine liberty to the particular instances where we know it will do good. Freedom granted only when it is known beforehand that its effects will be beneficial is not freedom. If we knew how freedom would be used, the case for it would largely disappear. We shall never get the benefits of freedom, never obtain those unforeseeable new developments for which it provides the opportunity, if it is not also granted where the uses made of it by some do not seem desirable. It is therefore no argument against individual freedom that it is frequently abused. Freedom necessarily means that many things will be done which we do not like. Our faith in freedom does not rest on the foreseeable results in particular circumstances but on the belief that it will, on balance, release more forces for the good than for the bad. 

It also follows that the importance of our being free to do a particular thing has nothing to do with the question of whether we or the majority are ever likely to make use of that particular possibility. To grant no more freedom than all can exercise would be to misconceive its function completely. The freedom that will be used by only one man in a million may be more important to society and more beneficial to the majority than any freedom that we all use.

It might even be said that the less likely the opportunity to make use of freedom to do a particular thing, the more precious it will be for society as a whole. The less likely the opportunity, the more serious will it be to miss it when it arises, for the experience that it offers will be nearly unique. It is also probably true that the majority are not directly interested in most of the important things that any one person should be free to do. It is because we do not know how individuals will use their freedom that it is so important. If it were otherwise, the results of freedom could also be achieved by the majority’s deciding what should bedone by the individuals. But majority action is, of necessity, confined to the already tried and ascertained, to issues on which agreement has already been reached in that process of discussion that must be preceded by different experiences and actions on the part of different individuals.

The benefits I derive from freedom are thus largely the result of the uses of freedom by others, and mostly of those uses of freedom that I could never avail myself of. It is therefore not necessarily freedom that I can exercise myself that is most important for me. It is certainly more important that anything can be tried by somebody than that all can do the same things. It is not because we like to be able to do particular things, not because we regard any particular freedom as essential to our happiness, that we have a claim to freedom. The instinct that makes us revolt against any physical restraint, though a helpful ally, is not always a safe guide for justifying or delimiting freedom. What is important is not what freedom I personally would like to exercise but what freedom some person may need in order to do things beneficial to society. This freedom we can assure to the unknown person only by giving it to all.

The benefits of freedom are therefore not confined to the free—or, at least, a man does not benefit mainly from those aspects of freedom which he himself takes advantage of. There can be no doubt that in history unfree majorities have benefited from the existence of free minorities and that today unfree societies benefit from what they obtain and learn from free societies. Of course the benefits we derive from the freedom of others become greater as the number of those who can exercise freedom increases. The argument for the freedom of some therefore applies to the freedom of all. But it is still better for all that some should be free than none and also that many enjoy full freedom than that all have a restricted freedom. The significant point is that the importance of freedom to do a particular thing has nothing to do with the number of people who want to do it: it might almost be in inverse proportion. One consequence of this is that a society may be hamstrung by controls, although the great majority may not be aware that their freedom has been significantly curtailed. If we proceeded on the assumption that only the exercises of freedom that the majority will practice are important, we would be certain to create a stagnant society with all the characteristics of unfreedom.”

KOSU: Health leaders push Oklahoma to adopt more restrictive marijuana rules

News 9: Oklahoma recreational marijuana petition growing closer to goal

New York Times: Facebook’s push for facial recognition prompts privacy alarms

Washington Examiner: Brett Kavanaugh’s defense of NSA phone surveillance looms as confirmation question

Vanity Fair: China’s terrifying Surveillance State looks a lot like America’s future

Techdirt: Yes, privacy is important, but California’s new privacy bill is an unmitigated disaster in the making

Activist Post: Smart technology that tracks people through walls raises privacy concerns

UnDark: Forget killer robots, autonomous weapons are already online

Zero Hedge: Boston Dynamics upgrades ‘terrifying’ robots with creepy features

Haaretz: Rights groups demand Israel stop arming neo-Nazis in Ukraine

LUCY STEIGERWALD: The case for abolishing ICE

High Times: Welcome to Amsterdam, birthplace of the Cannabis Cup

Horizon: Plasma accelerators could overcome size limits of Large Hadron Collider

The number of clicks that this blog receives immediately upon publishing a post continues to amaze me. It’s gone up steadily over the past few weeks, as has the daily readership.  This is very flattering, but also makes me feel a bit guilty, as I haven’t been as consistent as I would like in posting. This will change.  To those who’ve signed up for Republic Reborn updates via email, I greatly appreciate it. To be honest I didn’t realize that was a thing, but now that I look at the home page more closely, yep, there it is.

Now. This blog exists purely to advance the ideal of liberty in a manner that’s both philosophical and practical, for the explicit purpose of realizing liberty within our lifetimes, and that of our children.  I for one would feel ashamed delivering my children into the maw a such a corrupt, debt-ridden monster, as currently holds power over our lives and paychecks, without some kind of protest. I do not accept that I exist for the sake of the State, I do not accept that endless war, total surveillance, and the rapid march into a prison society is my children’s fate.  Government, if it is to exist at all, exists to serve and protect my liberty.  Ours no longer does, and has forfeited any legitimacy remaining to it.  So change must happen, and that can only happen when we resolve to lend our one small voice to others, and refuse to believe that the battle for liberty is hopeless.

It is possible to successfully oppose an authoritarian government, and no more perfect example can be pointed to than in the recent unseating of the authoritarian state senator Ervin Yen from Oklahoma’s District 40 by a highly organized and targeted campaign led by Liza Greve and her activist group, Oklahomans for Vaccine and Health Choice.  To put it simply, Greve and her inspired, relentless group of ‘Mama Bears’ formed like Voltron in Yen’s district, and, with a rare relentlessness, unceremoniously booted him from said district and out of the lives of Oklahomans, defeating virtually the entire Medical Establishment that had backed Yen’s variety of medical tyranny.

The passage of State Question 788, legalizing medical marijuana, was also a right hook to the entire Political Establishment by the people who’ve paid the bills and borne the brunt of every failed social program, an establishment which has a major financial and power stake in the continued prohibition of marijuana.

We stand for liberty.  We will not be satisfied with a mere defense of current liberties; we will actively work to remove government chains from all other, long-lost, liberties.  The chains will then be placed back on government, more securely this time.  We stand for nothing less than the expansion of choice to every corner of voluntary human conduct.  We seek to give our children a world with greater liberty, not less. Tyranny, war, the diminishment of choice in every aspect of life, a total, all-encompassing Surveillance State that monitors and catalogues our every movement, is only inevitable if we believe it to be so.

We are the shield between future generations and the State. We will not continue to have our rights trampled, our wallets looted, our money debased, while the State seeks to replace us as the parent to our children. That is clearly what is at stake, and should be seen as our primary duty. We must put our hand on the plow and not look back.

Sooner Politics: Final draft of Oklahoma medical marijuana rules

Also Sooner Politics: The attempted control of cannabis medicine markets

Huffington Post: Latest ICE data details increasingly indiscriminate arrests

Cato: Why is the NSA deleting call records?

Libertarian Institute: Why no outrage over US killing of children?

National Review: Why should a single federal judge be able to make law for the entire country?

The Intercept: MSNBC does not merely permit fabrications against Democratic Party critics. It encourages and rewards them.

FEE: The Western world’s most depressing chart

TAC: The strange decline of H.L. Mencken

Zero Hedge: US declassifies 100s of nuclear test videos to YouTube

Nextgov: MIT’s new cheetah robot navigates while ‘blind’

The Independent: Why psychedelics could be the new class of antidepressant

High Times: Oklahoma public school plans to increase random drug tests for students

Reason: Miami cops forced to return almost $20,000 in cash to stripper. They also had to pay her legal bills.

Huffington Post: After promises of ‘transparency’, Pentagon under scrutiny for troop number blackouts

National Review: Against packing the courts

Cato: Why so many refugees from Central America?

The Guardian: Thanks to Amazon, the government will now be able to track your face

Electronic Frontier Foundation: EFF to Illinois Supreme Court: Protect biometric privacy

Tom’s Hardware: Civil rights groups fight to keep Illinois’ biometric privacy law

Washington Examiner: Conservatives, civil libertarians pan Supreme Court finalist Brett Kavanaugh’s ‘troubling’ NSA ruling

Volokh Conspiracy: When does a Carpenter search start…and when does it stop?

Common Dreams: Americans deserve privacy protection from Big Data

Fortune: DNA tests of separated children raise privacy concerns Ed: It was extremely reckless for authorities to separate parents from children too young to identify their mother and father. But it’s a great way to fabricate a justification for biometric data collection.

The Hill: Memos detail FBI’s ‘hurry the F up pressure’ to probe Trump campaign

Techdirt: Malaysian government decides to dump its terrible anti-fake news law

The Spec: US Border Patrol stopping and boarding Canadian fishing boats

Truthdig: The media needs to radically change the way it covers ‘foiled terror plots’

The Week: Scott Pruitt was the conservative caricature of a liberal bureaucrat Ed: Did we Oklahomans not notice his fussy elitism because we’re just used to it here? There seems to be a case for it, as Pruitt’s behavior appears to have flown under the radar until he went to Washington.  So are Oklahoma politicians more corrupt than even those in DC?

New York Times: Making American unemployed again

FEE: Socialism isn’t built on compassion. It’s built on dehumanizing others.

OKCFriday: Ervin Yen cites stance on pot and immunizations for primary loss

The Independent: Majority of doctors who oversee FDA drug approval receive payments from companies they monitor, report shows

And more: MedicalXpress: What Big Pharma pays your doctor

The Guardian: Goodbye to Scott Pruitt, the worst EPA administrator of all time

The Verge: London police chief ‘completely comfortable’ using facial recognition with 98 percent false positive rate

Motherboard: Leaked emails show cops trying to hide emails about phone-hacking tools

Reason: School strip-searches 22 sixth-grade girls because a cop thought they were hiding $50 in their underwear

Also Reason: Facebook algorithm flags, removes Declaration of Independence text as hate speech

Techdirt: Police chief tries to blame newspaper shooting on the loss of social media monitoring tool, but it doesn’t add up

Activist Post: Mainstream media admits FBI groomed terrorist for 4th of July attack, gave him supplies

The American Conservative: Where the Right when wrong on criminal justice

The Intercept: An American century of brutal overseas conquest began at Guantanamo Bay

UNZ: Feeding the monster: Washington’s spinelessness enables Israeli brutality : “A recent story illustrates just how horrible the Israelis can be without any pushback whatsoever coming from Washington objecting to their behavior. As the United States is the only force that can in any way compel Israel to come to its senses and chooses not to do so, that makes U.S. policymakers and by extension the American people complicit in Israel’s crimes.

The particularly horrible recent account that I am referring to describes how fanatical Jewish settlers burned alive a Palestinian family on the West Bank, including a baby, and then celebrated the deaths while taunting the victims’ surviving family when they subsequently appeared in court. The story was covered in Israel and Europe but insofar as I could determine did not appear in any detail in the U.S. mainstream media.

Israeli Jewish settlers carried out their shameful deed outside a court in the city of Lod, chanting “’Ali was burned, where is Ali? There is no Ali. Ali is burned. On the fire. Ali is on the grill!” referring to the 18-month old baby Ali Dawabsheh, who was burnt alive in 2015 by Jewish settlers hurling Molotov cocktails into a house in the West Bank town of Duma. Ali’s mother Riham and father Saad also died of their burns and were included in the chanting “Where is Ali? Where is Riham? Where is Saad? It’s too bad Ahmed didn’t burn as well.” Five year-old Ahmed, who alone survived the attack with severe burns, will have scars for the rest of his life.”

Boing Boing: Church cages Jesus, Mary, and Joseph to protest ICE immigrant abuse. Ed: Important to protest government abuse of children, but where are all these people when children die from our government’s endless foreign wars? What about the thousands of children starving to death in Yemen? I understand the sentiment, but too many people act like this is the first, or worst, crime against children by our government. It’s not even close.

Reason: Legal or illegal, fireworks are more available than ever

Also Reason: L.A. mayor’s warning about the dangers of fireworks blows up in his face

Techdirt: Cops are telling paramedics to inject arrestees with ketamine. Worse, EMS crews are actually doing it.

RYAN MCMAKEN: The fact that you can vote doesn’t make government abuse OK

The American Conservative: Selective moral outrage cheapens authentic protest

High Times: The industries that oppose marijuana legalization

First, from Hayek:

“We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage. What we lack is a liberal Utopia, a programme which seems neither a mere defence of things as they are nor a diluted kind of socialism, but a truly liberal radicalism which does not spare the susceptibilities of the mighty (including the trade unions), which is not too severely practical and which does not confine itself to what appears today as politically possible…Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark. But if we can regain that belief in power of ideas which was the mark of liberalism at its best, the battle is not lost.”

Then Mises, from his book, Socialism:

“Everyone carries a part of society on his shoulders; no one is relieved of his share of responsibility by others. And no one can find a safe way out for himself if society is sweeping toward destruction. Therefore, everyone, in his own interests, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle. None can stand aside with unconcern; the interest of everyone hangs on the result. Whether he chooses or not, every man is drawn into the great historical struggle, the decisive battle into which our epoch has plunged us.”

And the last is from Ron Paul, and I’ll just let him do the talking:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWJ34YANTYU

The quote from Paul, “let it not be said that we did nothing”, struck a chord with me and many of his followers when he first uttered it on the House floor. It’s important because it defies the defeatism that is rife in some libertarian circles. Some won’t get up and do anything unless they believe there’s a fair chance of success, and when the prospects for liberty appear dim, these types seem to ensure a self-fulfilling prophecy by refusing to engage in any activism at all on the grounds of, “what is there even to do? What will my single voice accomplish?” They fail to see that a defense of liberty, a refusal to let our silence be misinterpreted as consent to government crimes, is first and foremost a matter of principle. I object to war, prohibition, and a descent into tyranny because it is wrong, and I lend my small voice on principle, whether or not anyone is listening should be of secondary importance. Seeking out those who share my beliefs should be a next small step, followed by more small steps, always made on principle.  Ron Paul himself has shown what is possible for one person to achieve when he follows his convictions in a systematic, strategic manner. Virtually all the victories for liberty were accomplished by small groups who refused to surrender to the fatalism of, “what can little old me do?” The recent legalization of medical marijuana and ousting of authoritarian Senator Ervin Yen in Oklahoma proves that, well, you can do a lot, if you apply yourself.

But if liberty does whither in some national bout of State worship or nuclear exchange, let it not be said that we did nothing.