REPUBLIC REBORN

The Guardian: “A crack in the edifice”: Privacy advocates hail Supreme Court cellphone data ruling

And more: LA Times: The Supreme Court protects privacy in the digital age

Heroic: BoingBoing: Googlers’ ethical refusal to build airgap systems curtailed Google’s ability to bid on sensitive military contracts

EFF: Illinois declines to adopt proposed arbitrary drone surveillance of protests

The Intercept: Trump insider wanted to sell social media surveillance tools to abusive governments, leaked documents suggest

WSWS: US Navy planning to build military camps to jail 120,000 immigrants

CNN: Canada becomes second nation in the world to legalize marijuana after Uruguay

True-life tales from Ancapistan, amirite? The Hill: Canada to allow mail-order marijuana sales

FEE: Tariffs are harming the American workers they’re supposed to protect

Techcrunch: In Army of None, a field guide to the coming world of autonomous warfare

The heat is on as the day to cast our vote for medical marijuana in this state draws near, and everyone with a finger in the prohibitionist pot is bringing out the big guns to ensure that their golden goose isn’t pried from their greedy, greasy hands by the citizens of Oklahoma who have had to pony up the taxes, and bear the brunt, of the farcical, tragic, War on Drugs. Sheriffs, district attorneys, prisons both public and private, the entire medical/pharmaceutical complex eager to keep the public addicted to their patented poisons, the peddlers of Surveillance State tech goodies that are deployed against innocent civilians by cops increasingly taught that they’re soldiers at war, and increasingly behaving as if they were, and many, many more.

But it’s a virtual victory come Tuesday (but only if you vote!), and how sweet it is to see every political and corporate parasite make their final, pathetic stand against a measure that would increase liberty and simultaneously decrease their power and income.  And so the lies come out: “SQ 788 will let veterinarians prescribe marijuana”, “…students will be allowed to grow marijuana in their dorms”, “…the filth-covered potheads will come scurrying out of the tunnels and smoking marijuana right next to your babies”, etc. And the biggest lie of all: “this is recreational marijuana disguised as medical”.  No, it clearly is not. The language of 788 requires approval of a board-certified physician before obtaining a license for medical marijuana.

And the elite rag of the Oklahoma Political Class has been unloading clip after clip at supporters of 788, but they’re firing blanks, as the lies are falling on fewer and fewer willing listeners. The people who’ve been forcibly funding the boondoggles of the Political Class, all the grand plans that have run this state into the ground, are becoming immune to the desperate lies designed to keep the party going. For anyone but us, that is.

The Establishment is afraid of 788 because it is true medical marijuana, not a crony half-measure that ensures the right people receive their cut first.

And if you’ll remember Oklahoma’s own Scott Pruitt, the current head of the EPA, and laughingstock of the entirety of DC, attempted to rewrite SQ 788 in a blatant effort to mislead voters into misconstruing the initiative as legalizing recreational marijuana, was rejected by the Oklahoma Supreme Court.

In truth, the War on Drugs is nothing more than a war on our liberty.  It has unleashed a black market plague of meth, heroin, and criminals to supply a demand that, due to the ridiculous prohibition of safer alternatives, cannot currently be supplied by legal businesses in an open and free market.

Another truth, and one that becomes plainly evident every time a real threat to the existence of the gravy train of Prohibition emerges, is that the Drug War is nothing more than a jobs program for hundreds of thousands of workers at the federal and state level.

An entire bureaucracy has been built up around prohibition to combat it, and now, as with every other war, foreign and domestic, that our Political Class is busy waging, this bureaucracy realizes that it needs the Drug War to continue to exist. Far-reaching powers of surveillance have been built upon this ridiculous policy of Prohibition, and rooting out and dismantling the power structure built upon it is an Augean stable of a task, but 788 is a mighty first step toward washing away the horse manure of entrenched corruption.

The promise of legal marijuana in Oklahoma in reality means the promise of an end to a massive black market and all the societal ills that follow in its wake: the destruction of families, of entire communities, of the most vulnerable among us, an end to our sardine-can prisons, the promise of a way out of addiction for those held in thrall to meth, heroin, and opioids.  Legal marijuana means safe access to a safe product, access to a far safer high than meth, heroin, and even alcohol can provide.  It means thousands of jobs; real jobs with real paychecks. No federal grants, no phony taxpayer-subsidized “jobs”.  It means the elimination of the myriad fake jobs that make their living on the Drug War, paid for by us with our tax dollars and our liberty.  The promise of legal marijuana is the promise of a future with greater liberty, not less.  That’s a future worth working toward.

ACLU: Facial recognition cameras do not belong in schools

The Hill: Amazon employees protest sale of facial recognition tech to law enforcement

WSWS: ICE agents raid Ohio meatpacking plant, arrest 146 immigrants

CNET: ‘Tell Microsoft to drop ICE as a client or lose us as GitHub users’, say coders

Axios: Why Central Americans flee to the US despite “zero tolerance”

Chicago-Sun Times: Orlando airport is first to scan faces of all passengers on international flights

Techdirt: In a surprising decision, European Court of Human Rights says Sweden’s mass surveillance is fine

Reason: Congress wants to give Jeff Sessions unprecedented new Drug War powers

JOHN WHITEHEAD: We are all prisoners of the Surveillance State

FEE: Foreign tariffs are just domestic taxes

NonDoc: Lawyer lists top 7 misconceptions of State Question 788

Reason: Leaked internal memo reveals the ACLU is wavering on free speech

Reason: Senate can’t even muster the votes to to trim 0.08 percent of federal budget

Gizmodo: Lawsuit: Detained immigrant children forced to take antipsychotic drugs

The Nation: How private contractors enable Trump’s cruelties at the border Ed: Although, this type of detention had been occurring years before Trump

Ars Technica: Microsoft staff call on company to end ICE contract

The Verge: It’s not just Microsoft: lots of tech companies are quietly helping ICE

The Intercept: The US has conducted more than 550 drone strikes in Libya since 2011

New York Times: Why the US should drop all tariffs

FEE: The Drug War started 47 years ago. Here’s some commentary from Milton Friedman on that failed and shameful domestic war

Motherboard: The EU’s terrible, internet-wrecking copyright plan lurches forward

Consortium News: The Pentagon expands its provocative encirclement of China

Big Think: Study: Ecstasy could be far less dangerous than past research suggests

A short post published here yesterday received a surprising amount of attention, so I feel I should delve more deeply into the topic of Oklahoma Senator Ervin Yen’s paternalistic authoritarianism, and why it has no place in Oklahoma.

In truth, Yen himself makes a pretty good case for being removed from elected office. His recently-created Twitter account is nothing more than a string of attacks on various freedoms that he deems offensive.  What’s worse, he appears to believe what he’s saying.  There are few things more terrifying than the authoritarian who truly believes he knows what’s best for us, and is more than willing to use the coercive power of the State to override our ability to choose what’s best for ourselves.

Perhaps the most outrageous action Yen has taken as chairman of the Health and Human Services Committee is when, in April of last year,he refused to even allow a hearing on a bill that would address the severe healthcare provider shortage here in Oklahoma. With 75 out of the 77 counties in this state experiencing a health professional shortage, his action is a scandal of gargantuan proportions.

He also is a firm believer in mandatory vaccination, and has roused the fury of parents across the state, who have organized under banner of the Oklahomans for Vaccine and Health Choice, and rallied to “yank” him out of office, replacing him with Joe Howell on June 26th, the day of the primaries.

Like some strange, autocratic Don Quixote galloping along in a Lynchian nightmare, Yen tilts at the windmills of personal choice, deems them to be evil, and then throws himself headlong at his target, sword swinging wildly. Oklahoma can tolerate this state of affairs not a second longer.

To attack the freedom to make our own choices is to attack the very foundation of the ideals that this country was founded on, to attack the foundation of liberty itself.  Strange how rarely we hear a politician or candidate speak of liberty anymore. How rarely do we hear a politician bent on expanding choice, rather than diminishing it.

Yen places far too much faith in the redemptive power of legislation, which is nothing new to Oklahoma. Our present, dismal state of affairs here is a result of too much faith in government power, too little in the power of liberty.  But only liberty can correct this mess.

The case against Yen is the case against authoritarianism, against the misuse of power.  He has been no steward of the liberty of the people, and must be removed. Removing him, though, should be seen as a small battle in a larger effort to transform the way we view the role of government in our lives.  If government is to exist at all, it should be to protect liberty.  It is not our caretaker from cradle to grave, nor that of our children.  It only has the power that we give it, and it’s time to remove our consent.

Yen’s brand of hyperbolic authoritarianism has run this state into the ground, and he is proof positive that we don’t need to focus our attention on Washington D.C. if we wish to restore liberty.  The tyrants are in our backyard, in our communities, and must be fought (in an ideological, non-violent sense) there.  As Ludwig von Mises said:

“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 for himself if society is sweeping towards de­struction. Therefore everyone, in his own interests, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle. No one can stand aside with unconcern: the interests of everyone hang on the result.”

H/T Liberty Memes.

National Interest: Is NATO pushing Russia towards retaliation?

The Hill: PTSD awareness month– an average of 20 veterans per day commit suicide

The Intercept: The U.S. has taken more than 3,700 children from their parents, with no plan to return them

WSWS: Trump administration planning massive expansion of jails for immigrant children

Activist Post: “Where are the girls?” Child trafficking feared as DHS can’t say where immigrant girls are being held Ed: The pictures of immigrant children being detained only show boys.

New York Times: Stung by a boy’s suffering, UK reviews medical marijuana rules

The Free Thought Project: Taxpayers shell out $2 million after video showed cop kill innocent mother while attempting to kill her dog Ed: These videos are hard to watch, but we must. Why are stories of police gunning down pets so common? Another story that should be remembered is the brave woman who placed herself between her dog and trigger-happy cop intent on gunning it down.

The Daily Sheeple: Cops arrest protesters for desecrating Thin Blue Line flags

Reason: You might have a ‘uniquely compelling’ reason to find out whether your government has placed you on a kill list Ed: This story is insane. A journalist and American citizen has had five near-miss U.S. missile attacks, too improbable to be mere coincidence, so now he’s suing the government to get his name off whatever secret kill list that is endangering his life and hindering his work in Syria.

Mises: The cronyist origins of Social Security

The American Conservative: Common Core is a menace to pluralism and democracy

Motherboard: Verizon says it will stop selling US phone data that ended up in the hands of cops

OC Register: Strong encryption protects our data and our liberty. Don’t allow the feds to weaken it.

Antiwar.com: War-fighting and the loss of liberty

Gizmodo: The dangers of tech’s privacy promises

The Guardian: The war in Yemen is disastrous. America is only making it worse.

The Week: The government’s creepy obsession with your face

ABC News: Amazon shareholders to Jeff Bezos: Stop marketing facial recognition tool

Also ACLU: Over 150,000 people tell Amazon: Stop selling facial recognition tech to the police

Reason: Texas GOP endorses marijuana decriminalization

Zero Hedge: DOJ indicts suspect accused of “Vault 7” leak to Wikileaks, the largest CIA breach in history

The Federalist: 6 revelations from ‘The Swamp’ documentary show just how dirty DC is

BoingBoing: Microsoft employees pissed over company’s connection to ICE

Buzzfeed: Governors cancel their National Guard deployments to the border to protest Trump’s ‘inhumane’ separation of families

WSWS: Five die fleeing US immigration police as children spend Father’s Day in jail Ed: The illegal immigration that the US experiences is what appears to be ‘organic’. They have connections here, they have a place to go to, if they can only get there. And most have a job opportunity lined up, menial though it might be. This is good immigration, and it benefits our society greatly, They break their backs while on the clock, and keep to themselves when they feel they need to. Cracking down on this type of illegal immigration is the product of nothing more than the vulgar “law and order” style of politics. People eat it up, too. Those south of the border that come here are usually the decent people of the country fleeing their failed home states that are currently boiling over with a murderous level of corruption.

Reuters: Israel targets rights groups with bill to outlaw filming of soldiers

Truthdig: 25,000 have fled fighting in Yemen, according to UN numbers

High Times: Severely epileptic boy discharged from hospital after resuming CBD treatment

RON PAUL: Why can’t we sue the TSA for assault?

DiscoverMag: Ayahuasca, the psychedelic antidepressant?

ABC: Amazon, Microsoft, Uber donate to oppose the California Consumer Privacy Act

CNBC: Forget Facebook privacy, these companies are after your most private data: your DNA

Gizmodo: Google Translate can’t provide consent for police searches, judge rules

Activist Post: Michigan bans “material support or resources” for warrantless federal surveillance

The Guardian: UK police face legal action over use of facial recognition cameras

Zero Hedge: Are China’s “drone swarms” the military weapon of the future?

The Free Thought Project: Coward cop who hid from Parkland shooter had history of sexually harassing female students

The Intercept: The U.S. is exacerbating the world’s worst humanitarian crisis by outsourcing its Yemen policy

Boing Boing: Canada’s best weapon in a US trade-war: invalidating US pharma patents

GEORGE WILL: Congress’s shameful abdication of war-making powers continues apace

Reason: Why does the press routinely misidentify prostitution with “sex trafficking”?

Libertarian Institute: Libya “before and after” photos go viral

Liberty Fund: Why the Surveillance State is dangerous

An important passage from Chapter 3 of Law, Legislation, and Liberty:

“…where we rely on spontaneous ordering forces we shall often not be able to foresee the particular changes by which the necessary adaptation to altered external circumstances will be brought about, and sometimes perhaps not even be able to conceive in what manner the restoration of a disturbed ‘equilibrium’ or ‘balance’ can be accomplished. This ignorance of how the mechanism of the spontaneous order will solve such a ‘problem’ which we know must be solved somehow if the overall order is not to disintegrate, often produces a panic-like alarm and the demand for government action for the restoration of the disturbed balance. 

Often it is even the acquisition of a partial insight into the character of the spontaneous overall order that becomes the cause of the demands for deliberate control. So long as the balance of trade, or the correspondence of supply and demand of any particular commodity, adjusted itself spontaneously after any disturbance, men rarely asked themselves how this happened. But, once they became aware of the necessity of such constant readjustments, they felt that somebody must be made responsible for deliberately bringing them about. The economist, from the very nature of his schematic picture of the spontaneous order, could counter such apprehension only by the confident assertion that the required new balance would establish itself somehow if we did not interfere with the spontaneous forces; but, as he is usually unable to predict precisely how this would happen, his assertions were not very convincing. Yet when it is possible to foresee how the spontaneous forces are likely to restore the disturbed balance, the situation becomes even worse. The necessity of adaptation to unforeseen events will always mean that someone is going to be hurt, that someone’s expectations will be disappointed or his efforts frustrated. This leads to the demand that the required adjustment be brought about by deliberate guidance, which in practice must mean that authority is to decide who is to be hurt. The effect of this is often that necessary adjustments will be prevented whenever they can be foreseen.

What helpful insight science can provide for the guidance of policy consists in an understanding of the general nature of the spontaneous order, and not in any knowledge of the particulars of a concrete situation, which it does not and cannot possess.

It is not to be denied that to some extent the guiding model of the overall order will always be an Utopia, something to which the existing situation will be only a distant approximation and which many people will regard as wholly impractical. Yet it is only by constantly holding up the guiding conception of an internally consistent model which could be realized by the consistent application of the same principles, that anything like an effective framework for a functioning spontaneous order will be achieved. Adam Smith thought that ‘to expect, indeed, that freedom of trade should ever be entirely restored in Great Britain is as absurd as to expect an Oceana or Utopia should ever be established in it.’14 Yet seventy year later, largely as a result of his work, it was achieved.”

I post these long quotes because we must understand not only what we are against, but what we are for.  We are for the expansion of choice, of the complete legalization of every voluntary interaction among consenting adults. This will have the affect of unleashing Hayek’s “spontaneous forces”, or Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand”, which means nothing more than that society will solve the economic problem by rapidly correcting mistakes, such as poverty, black markets, etc.  Prosperity will take hold, and society as a whole will dramatically improve.  But we can’t predict exactly how it will improve.  We only know that it will. And the fact that the changes will be unpredictable will be unsettling to some, some who would rather use the organized control of the State to alter or prevent that change.  But society should be allowed to evolve.  If the evolution emerges in an undesigned fashion from entirely voluntary behavior, then it is an evolution that we needed, although we didn’t know it.  This of course all makes perfect sense to me, in the middle of the night.

Not to say that Yen is the only authoritarian among Oklahoma’s vaunted governing body, but there is something refreshing about his candid disdain for personal choice among us peasants. For proof, just peruse his month-old Twitter feed for 30 seconds.

It seems his sole political goal is to restrict choice for the average, not-politically-connected person. He opposes high school football, medical marijuana, vaccine choice, alleviating the profound doctor shortage that afflicts all of rural Oklahoma. Etc.

Chances are, if it expands your ability to make your own choices and those of your children, Yen is casting a skeptical eye, and preparing a tweet.

 “Medical marijuana has no place in #Oklahoma. I encourage all citizens to vote NO on SQ788. Only doctors should be able to prescribe medications and when re-elected I will again introduce new legislation to ensure we continue to protect our children.”

That’s right, Yen sells his variant of authoritarianism under the rubric of “it’s for the children”.  He seems to envision a future technocratic utopia of the prairie, where the only ones making any choices at all are a cabal of “highly-trained professionals”…for the children, of course.

On the bright side, a highly organized group of activists is pushing to oust the Senator and Health and Human Services chair, through their “Yank Yen!” campaign.  The group, Oklahomans for Vaccine and Health Choice, have a pro-vaccine choice candidate lined up to topple Yen, Joe Howell.

Looking at Yen’s political career and public statements in another light, one could see that he’s probably just building his resume for what will almost certainly turn into a lucrative, post-political career nestled somewhere within the tangled web of Big Pharma. I can imagine that his public pronouncements are a siren song to those cronyist giants.