REPUBLIC REBORN

Tulsa World: State Question 788 foes report $453,000 media buy to combat medical marijuana ballot measure

ABC News: When, not if: US poised to quit UN Human Rights Council Ed: For “chronic anti-Israel bias”, meaning the members of the council choose not to ignore Israel’s war crimes against the Palestinians.

The Intercept: If a prosecutor breaks the law in secret, does the crime exist? Not according to Texas prosecutors.

Activist Post: Trump administration gifts Syrian terrorist-linked ‘White Helmets’ $6.6 million

WSWS: The seige of Hodeidah, Washington’s war crime in Yemen Ed: With a population of around 500,000, it is Yemen’s most crowded city, and a key port for food and aid. And the Saudis and the UAE are about to fire every First World weapon of war, purchased from Uncle Sam, the world’s largest arms dealer, at the heavily-populated port city.

National Review: The strange tale of how the FBI’s anti-Trump bias helped elect Trump

The Free Thought Project: “Cameras off”: New video shows Vegas shooting strike team being told  to turn off body cams

Axios: Scott Pruitt’s laundry list

Reason: Flynn Effect goes in reverse in Norway

Arch Paper: In upstate New York, a DMT-inspired temple rises

I’m not really planning on spinning out an entire article on this topic, the title itself basically says all I want to say on it, as it’s the only conclusion one can draw from James Lankford’s recent comment that medical marijuana would be “harmful to the social fabric of Oklahoma”. Well, no. It wouldn’t. It would be enormously beneficial to this state, not only by granting citizens access to a safe and effective medicine that treats all sorts of ailments and afflictions, but in taking a highly profitable product out of the black market and placing it in the free market.  Does Lankford not believe in free markets? He says he does, but only in the abstract apparently.  When it counts, he shrinks in horror at what the unknown effects of a free market would be.  He prefers control, because he naturally believes that not only can government control the market economy, but that the effect of that control would be more beneficial than the effect of giving us a bit more freedom.

Lankford’s opinion is based around the superstitious fear of the consequences of liberty, as well as the hope that his voting base shares that superstitious fear.

Lankford is a supporter of liberty only in the abstract.  But where it counts, where the real litmus test resides, is supporting liberty in those specific instances when liberty is actually at stake. Whether war, spending, regulation, etc., those are the moments that prove who really cares about liberty.  Sadly, unsurprisingly, Lankford is not an ally of liberty, nor of any ‘Liberty Movement’, if such a thing still exists.  He’s an authoritarian, albeit one of the “it’s for the children” variety. But authoritarian nonetheless. He masks it with religion and sweet nothings, but the effect that it has on State power and the suffering of the civilian class is just as merciless.

Reason: Encryption wars ramp up as Apple improves phone security

Motherboard: Cops are confident iPhone hackers have found a workaround to Apple’s new security feature

BoingBoing: Defense contractors already making millions off detention of immigrant children

The Federalist: FBI lawyer told colleagues to go easy on Hillary: ‘She might be our next President’

JAMES BOVARD: A politically weaponized FBI is nothing new, but plenty dangerous

The American Conservative: Real takeaway: The FBI influenced the election of a President

Zero Hedge: US Intelligence developing better storage to hoard your data based on human DNA

WSWS: Deadly siege of Yemeni port of Hodeidah begins with Washington’s aid and approval

Mises: Splitting up California into 3 pieces is long overdue

FEE: Why the intellectual dark web had to go dark

The Free Thought Project: “You’re not going to f—ing film us”: Raging cop spits on, arrests innocent woman for filming

ScienceAlert: We have the best evidence yet that psychedelic drugs can repair broken neural networks

From Chapter 4, Freedom, Reason, and Tradition, of his Constitution of Liberty: 

“The argument for liberty, in the last resort, is indeed an argument for principles and against expediency in collective action, which, as we shall see, is equivalent to saying that only the judge and not the administrator may order coercion. When one of the intellectual leaders of nineteenth-century liberalism, Benjamin Constant, described liberalism as the système de principes, he pointed to the heart of the matter. Not only is liberty a system under which all government action is guided by principles, but it is an ideal that will not be preserved unless it is itself accepted as an overriding principle governing all particular acts of legislation. Where no such fundamental rule is stubbornly adhered to as an ultimate ideal about which there must be no compromise for the sake of material advantages—as an ideal which, even though it may have to be temporarily infringed during a passing emergency, must form the basis of all permanent arrangements—freedom is almost certain to be destroyed by piecemeal encroachments. For in each particular instance it will be possible to promise concrete and tangible advantages as the result of a curtailment of freedom, while the benefits sacrificed will in their nature always be unknown and uncertain. If freedom were not treated as the supreme principle, the fact that the promises which a free society has to offer can always be only chances and not certainties, only opportunities and not definite gifts to particular individuals, would inevitably prove a fatal weakness and lead to its slow erosion.”

The Guardian: Cosmetics chain Lush resumes undercover police poster campaign

The Week: The NSA knew about cell phone surveillance around the White House 6 years ago

Mashable: Apple’s officially making it harder for cops to bust into your iPhone

Reuters: Big Brother facial recognition by police challenged in Britain

The New American: Surveillance State grows with help from state and local accomplices Ed: A few days old, but so important.

Gizmodo: China to make RFID chips mandatory in cars so the government can track citizens on the road

Foreign Policy: In China’s far west, companies cash in on surveillance program that targets Muslims

Techdirt: South Carolina drug war cops routinely serve regular warrants as if they’re no-knock warrants

The Free Thought Project: Video of massive crowd chasing down British police at protest over man arrest for reporting on pedophiles Ed: It is apparently illegal to report on certain court trials of Muslim immigrant pedophile rings in Britain, probably due to the fear of the government not living up to PC standards.

Reason: Domino’s Pizza is fixing the roads of towns across the US, because local governments won’t

The American Conservative: The Saudi-UAE alliance is the most dangerous force in the Middle East today

Telegraph: Only 100 nuclear bombs needed to cause catastrophe around the world Ed: 15,000 currently exist.

The Guardian: ‘Surveillance society’: Has technology at the US-Mexico border gone too far?

New York Times: The US spends billions in defense aid. Is it working?

The Intercept: Law claiming to fight sex trafficking is doing the opposite: making sex work more dangerous

Boing Boing: The EU’s terrible copyright proposal will ‘carpet bomb’ the whole world’s internet with censorship and surveillance

Techdirt: Legislators reintroduce pro-encryption bills after FBI destroys it’s own ‘going dark’ narrative

The Intercept: Trump’s “zero tolerance” crackdown won’t stop border crossings but it could break the courts

McClatchyDC: A freed Guantanamo prisoner and his ex-guard meet again in remarkable Ramadan reunion

WhoWhatWhy: Google’s deep involvement with the Pentagon

NationalDefenseMag: Army to acquire new nano drones

Reason: You’ll soon be able to manufacture anything you want and governments will be powerless to stop it

Futurism: The guy who created Oculus has now made surveillance tech that acts as a virtual border wall

Gizmodo: Psychedelic drugs may help the brain repair itself, study finds

From Chapter 3 of The Constitution of Liberty: 

“The argument for liberty is not an argument against organization, which is one of the most powerful means that human reason can employ, but an argument against all exclusive, privileged, monopolistic organization, against the use of coercion to prevent others from trying to do better. Every organization is based on given knowledge; organization means commitment to a particular aim and to particular methods, but even organization designed to increase knowledge will be effective only insofar as the knowledge and beliefs on which its design rests are true. And if any facts contradict the beliefs on which the structure of the organization is based, this will become evident only in its failure and supersession by a different type of organization. Organization is therefore likely to be beneficial and effective so long as it is voluntary and is embedded in a free sphere and will either have to adjust itself to circumstances not taken into account in its conception or fail. To turn the whole of society into a single organization built and directed according to a single plan would be to extinguish the very forces that shaped the individual human minds that planned it.”

It’s strange to realize that every societal problem we face today is due to a lack of liberty, which itself is due to a pervasive distrust of the consequences of liberty, which, although they are unpredictable, are always beneficial.  This state in particular is suffering from string of catastrophes which include the shameful fact that we have the highest incarceration rate in the world.  This is a consequence of a fear of liberty, a fear that the ruling class has an interest in perpetuating and inflaming.  All that is required to solve these unending crises is to remove the restrictions, regulations, and prohibitions, and let what Albert Jay Nock termed ‘social power’ solve the problems that government created.  Fear leads us to support politicians and measures that promise more control, but this control only creates greater and more uncontrollable problems down the road.  It also has the even more negative effect of creating the perfect environment for greater corruption, in a cycle that spirals into a situation we have today.  Only by unleashing Hayek’s “uncontrolled spontaneous forces” will our problems be solved.  But it would be so easy, and it would cost nothing.

CBS News: Israel uses data, algorithms to predict, prevent, 200 Palestinian attacks Ed: And here is the true way that governments will use facial recognition and data tech: the suppression of undesirable groups of people.  In Israel’s case, it’s the inhabitants of the biggest concentration camp in the world, consisting of over one million Palestinian Arabs. And now the state of Israel is carrying out some strange historical/ethnic revenge against the Arab world with the use of sophisticated surveillance-data-tech aimed at Palestinians.  When they aren’t murdering protesters and medics, of course. Should we care? Yes, due to the fact that $3 billion and handed out to Israel every year.  Not to mention the blind eye the US turns to Israeli atrocities, which is probably worth quite a bit more.

Techdirt: Australian cops say their unreliable drug dogs will decide who gets to attend music festivals Ed: Drug dogs, with a 74% failure rate at detecting drugs, are nothing more than “probable cause on four legs”.

Reason: Lindsay Graham says only possible outcomes from Trump-Kim talks are ‘peace or war’. He’s wrong. Ed: The presence of nuclear weapons are the only reason North Korea hasn’t been invaded and overthrown. It would be suicidal for Kim to give them up.

DAVID HARSANYI: Free trade already puts America first

Motherboard: Facebook says its competitors are the whole internet, because Facebook itself has replaced the internet for many people

EFF: The ENCRYPT Act protects encryption from U.S. state prying

The American Conservative: Why Trump’s next pardon should be CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou

Buzzfeed: Here are 18 things you might not have realized Facebook tracks about you

Defense One: How sanctions feed authoritarianism

Activist Post: What could go wrong? US army planning to deploy autonomous killer robots on battlefield by 2028

NewsOn6: Oklahoma veteran claims medical marijuana saved his life

Nextgov: Intelligence community wants to use DNA to store extabytes of data

Engadget: Stanford’s new lab could make particle accelerators 1,000 times smaller

Boing Boing: Why these libraries welcome the bat colonies that live among the books

Reason: Abolish ICE: “After 9/11, at the behest of the George W. Bush administration, lawmakers voted to consolidate 22 federal agencies and 170,000 employees under the Department of Homeland Security. The Immigration and Naturalization Service (previously part of the Justice Department) and the U.S. Customs Service (previously part of the Treasury Department) were swept into this newly created behemoth and then re-divided into U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and ICE.

But ensconcing immigration in a department focused on national security resulted in a mentality shift. Immigrants came to be regarded not as friends but as foes—potential terrorists or criminals. (This, even though cities with large immigrant populations have lower crime rates than cities with fewer immigrants.)”

Salon: Trump backs off states that legalize marijuana, so why is Colorado still prohibiting access to some? Ed: Colorado gov. Hickenlooper recently vetoed a measure that would allow children with autism access to medical marijuana.

Amnesty International: EU: States push to relax rules on exporting surveillance technology to human rights abusers

WSWS: The pseudo-Left stabs Julian Assange in the back

Enid News: Oklahoma’s medical marijuana law would bring steep tax