REPUBLIC REBORN

Truthdig: ‘We live in a Golden Age of surveillance’

Activist Post: Country Time stands up to ‘arcane laws’ against kids’ lemonade stands

URI AVNERY: The brainwashing of the Israelis Ed: It’s exactly the same as how the Chinese are brainwashed to view Tibet and Buddhism in such a negative light.

NextGov: Drone cops take flight in Los Angeles Ed: High-tech surveillance is just lazy police work.

FEE: How should we think about public policy proposals? Government-by-unicorn

Here is the report, released Friday, that found Oklahoma to hold the highest incarceration rate in the world. We lock up 1,079 out of every 100,000 people in this state.

The American Conservative: Veterans cheer as VA, DoD take a beating at burn pits hearing

New York Times: In Newark, police cameras and the internet watch you

Jacobin: Tech workers versus the Pentagon

Washington Post: Don’t be Paul Manafort: How to make your online communications more secure

WSWS: Cincinnati, Ohia area fentanyl overdoses increased by one thousand percent over the last five years

Ron Paul Institute: A retirement community for drug-sniffing dogs

Consortium News: The eerie silence surrounding the Assange case

FEE: Immigration unleashes human capital and saves lives

SHELDON RICHMAN: Separation, not association, requires force

Reason: Off-grid survival for you and me

From Chapter 3 of 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.

Quartz: This is the week that the drone surveillance state became real

Antiwar.com: US-led strikes kill 100 Syrian civilians

Techdirt: FBI hoovered up two years’ worth of a journalist’s phone and email records to hunt down a leaker

WSWS: Anti-“fake news” bill gives French state unchecked internet censorship powers

FPIF: Why we should be alarmed that Israeli forces and US police are training together

Gizmodo: Apple isn’t your friend

Activist Post: Real-time drone surveillance system is being programmed to detect violence

Aeon: What if E.T. is an A.I.?

Motherboard: Scientists want to talk to people who’ve had life-changing experiences while using psychedelics

Tulsa World: Oklahoma now has the highest incarceration rate in the nation, study finds Ed: Which means we have the highest incarceration rate in the world. Incomprehensible.

Chicago Tribune: Illinois lawmakers OK medical marijuana as painkiller substitute, bill now goes to governor

Gizmodo: Students pledge to refuse job interviews at Google in protest of Pentagon work

Fortune: Google makes vague pledge to limit work on AI in weapons, surveillance

Slate: The next frontier of police surveillance is drones: “A company that makes stun guns and body cameras is teaming up with a company that makes drones to sell drones to police departments, and that might not even be the most worrisome part. The line of drones from Axon and DJI is called the Axon Air, and the devices will be linked to Axon’s cloud-based database for law enforcement, Evidence.com, which is used to process body-camera data too. And it could open a vast new frontier for police surveillance.”

Common Dreams: Trump is making mass incarceration worse, despite clemency grant for 63-year old grandmother

TRF: World less peaceful than a decade ago: Index

The Federalist: Why intelligence agencies’ abuse of power should be a litmus test for the Right

SHELDON RICHMAN: How the US created Israel and a whole lot of trouble

TheFreeThoughtProject: Cop mistakes autism for drug use, beats innocent child on video. Taxpayers pick up tab on lawsuit. Ed: People become animals when they are either afraid or hold unaccountable power. Time to remove the latter from police.

Motherboard: We asked MIT researchers why they made a ‘psychotic AI’ that only sees death

The views that this blog receives daily are greatly appreciated. For those that click on the Facebook link, consider sharing the posts, or do whatever you like.  Other than posting links to Facebook, I do no actual blog promotion, something I should probably begin at some point.  I mainly post news stories that are interesting to myself, with some posts consisting of me thinking out loud, along with posting quotes from books that influence my thinking on the ideas surrounding political liberty.  I do post quite a bit of news and commentary involving the burgeoning ‘Surveillance State’, or Tech-Industrial Complex.  As more and more of the largest tech corporations are roped into Pentagon surveillance/AI deals, it becomes more worrisome to me as to what the future holds.  Perfect surveillance of the people by the most blood-thirsty institution that humankind has ever created, the State, is, for the first time in history, within the realm of possibility.  This must be prevented, if we are to preserve, not only our liberty, but our species.  It can be debated whether or not we need government, but there is no question that this creature of our own creation is at all times hungering to metamorphose into the great machine of mass murder that history has shown it to be. We must surveil it, not the other way around.  We must disarm it, and we must always ensure it remains locked within its Pandorica-esque prison. But immediately, and insidiously, government begins surrounding itself with a religious aura, demanding worship and acts of fealty.  It exploits the tribal instinct, and employs the most persuasive silver-tongued, flag-enshrouded lies to convince the people to let it out of its cage.  And no lie more persuasive or more pleasing to the ego than that government itself is “the people”.  The antidote, I believe, lies in the reading of Hayek, Miss, Nock, Isabel Patterson, Mencken, and many others.  To not give in to the tribal worship of the State, either through mindless salutes and songs, or through the endless rationalizations for the next tax, regulation, or war.  That we do not exist for the sake of the State is the first superstition to free oneself of.  And it is ingrained at a very young age.  Our children’s lives and income are not fodder for the next overseas slaughter.  The government serves us, not the other way around.  If it is the other way round, then it is illegitimate, and it’s claims on our income and future are also illegitimate.  I say that if we must have a State, then bring back the monarchy.  Let the State be a State out in the open, with no pretense that the people govern themselves.  Brighten the line between civilian class and governing class.

And now to Hayek, from Chapter 3 of Law, Legislation, and Liberty, the only books I’ve been reading lately:

“The thesis of this book is that a condition of liberty in which all are allowed to use their knowledge for their purposes, restrained only by rules of just conduct of universal application, is likely to produce for them the best conditions for achieving their aims; and that such a system is likely to be achieved and maintained only if all authority, including that of the majority of the people, is limited in the exercise of coercive power by general principles to which the community has committed itself.

Individual freedom, wherever it has existed, has been largely the product of a prevailing respect for such principles which, however, have never been fully articulated in constitutional documents. Freedom has been preserved for prolonged periods because such principles, vaguely and dimly perceived, have governed public opinion. The institutions by which the countries of the Western world have attempted to protect individual freedom against progressive encroachment by government have always proved inadequate when transferred to countries where such traditions did not prevail. And they have not provided sufficient protection against the effects of new desires which even among the peoples of the West now often loom larger than the older conceptions—conceptions that made possible the periods of freedom when these peoples gained their present position.”

I don’t get the hubbub over Westworld. It’s like diet Battlestar Galactica but with the gratuitous sex and violence of GOT. Which is probably what so enthralls viewers, and gives it such high ratings. Lip service is paid to the plot, but it’s a cheap derivative of other, greater sci-fi epics.  Westworld’s Dolores and Maeve have nothing on Caprica Six, or Summer Glau’s Cameron, or Sean Young’s tragic replicant Rachel.

“Do you like our owl?” The first contact and subsequent interaction between Deckard and Rachel in a smoky, sepia room is worth an entire season of Westworld.  

“Have you ever retired a human by mistake?”

The same could be said of David, of Prometheus and Covenant.  The conversation between David and an aging Peter Weyland at the outset of Covenant stands far above the flashy series: “You seek your creator, I am looking at mine. I will serve you, yet you are human. You will die, I will not.” Nothing in the HBO series approaches anything close to this. How seriously Westworld takes itself is ridiculous. And that concludes this evening’s criticism.

This time from Chapter 2 of his masterful, profound, Law, Legislation, and Liberty: 

“It would be no exaggeration to say that social theory begins with—and has an object only because of—the discovery that there exist orderly structures which are the product of the action of many men but are not the result of human design. In some fields this is now universally accepted. Although there was a time when men believed that even language and morals had been ‘invented’ by some genius of the past, everybody recognizes now that they are the outcome of a process of evolution whose results nobody foresaw or designed.  But in other fields many people still treat with suspicion the claim that the patterns of interaction of many men can show an order that is of nobody’s deliberate making; in the economic sphere, in particular, critics still pour uncomprehending ridicule on Adam Smith’s expression of the ‘invisible hand’ by which, in the language of his time, he described how man is led ‘to promote an end which was no part of his intentions’.10 If indignant reformers still complain of the chaos of economic affairs, insinuating a complete absence of order, this is partly because they cannot conceive of an order which is not deliberately made, and partly because to them an order means something aiming at concrete purposes which is, as we shall see, what a spontaneous order cannot do.”

Millions of people, going about their daily lives, working, saving, consuming, making choices, unknowingly form an invisible collective organism that solves the problem of the unknowability of the future for us.  The kaledic, dark forces “of time and igorance”, as Keynes aptly described them, should ruin us and destroy society. But they don’t. And they don’t precisely thanks to the unplanned forces that emerge from millions, billions, of people living out their lives according to the rules of voluntary conduct.  The right conditions are created, and the crystal grows.

Auburn University economist, and Mises U. lecturer, Roger Garrison, compared the superficially improbably flourishing of macroeconomic activity with the flight of a bumblebee. A bumblebee has no business flying so well, given it’s shape, weight, and wing size.  Yet it does.  Here is a link to Garrison’s 2004 paper with the analogy:

From Keynes to Hayek: The Marvel of Thriving Macroeconomies

Common Dreams: As mysterious ‘Stingray’ use sparks fears in DC, Trump FCC chair accused of ‘stonewalling’ probe

Reason: 5 years after Snowden, has anything changed?

New York Times: Protecting privacy is a civil rights issue

EFF: California’s cannabis buyers deserve data privacy rights

The Verge: Why a DNA data breach is much worse than a credit card leak

Gizmodo: Homeland Security to test facial recognition at US-Mexico border

Reason: Personal Encryption 101

WSWS: Amnesty International report finds US guilty of war crimes in Syria

The Guardian: “Precision” airstrikes kill civilians

Techdirt: Press wakes up to the fact that DNC’s lawsuit against Wikileaks could harm press freedoms

ABC: DOJ watchdog finds James Comey defied authority as FBI director

Engadget: Vintage NSA posters remix pop culture as security warnings

BoingBoing: For more than a decade, Facebook shared your friends’ data and other sensitive info with phone makers

Bloomberg: Apple throws a wrench in Facebook’s data-gathering engine

WSWS: Facebook security officer: Not all speech is “created equal”

Forbes: The case for end-to-end encryption

Gizmodo: I’ll believe Apple is killing cops’ anti-encryption tools when they actually do it

The Star Online: Big Tech firms march to the beat of Pentagon and CIA despite dissension

Scientific American: How Google could help end war

Anything that can, will, be used to rationalize total surveillance: Techdirt: 30,000 cameras can’t be wrong: Chicago banks on surveillance to solve violence problem

The Hill: The ethical conflict between surveillance capitalism and artificial intelligence

NationalDefenseMag: Algorithmic warfare: Pentagon eyeing AI center for tech development

The Intercept: Police broke into Chelsea Manning’s apartment with guns drawn…for a “wellness check”

Counterpunch: Welcome to Police-State America, weary traveler

The American Conservative: When the content police came for the Babylon Bee

National Review: Masterpiece Cakeshop is a setback for liberty Ed: It was a simple matter freedom of association: the baker didn’t want to do business with the gay couple. He didn’t need to give a reason, but it could have been any reason at all and it still shouldn’t have mattered. People as customers shouldn’t be forced to buy products from certain privileged businesses, and businesses shouldn’t be forced to serve a customer if they choose not to.  Freedom of association, or voluntarism, is pretty much the foundation of a free society.

The Verge: Acid might actually improve society, new study suggests