REPUBLIC REBORN

Truthdig: How the Pentagon paid for NFL displays of patriotism

New York Times: Can 30,000 cameras solve Chicago’s crime problem?

The American Spectator: The London-to-Langley spy ring

Muckrock: In the 50’s, CIA decried Soviet torture tactics that would later be used at Gitmo and other Agency black sites

The American Conservative: UN: Another 10 million Yemenis at risk of starvation by year’s end

NextGov: This start-up’s racial-profiling algorithm shows AI can be dangerous way before any robot apocalypse

Buzzfeed: Disturbing video shows cop punching 20-year old woman in the head at a New Jersey beach

Reason: Government has ‘lost’ 1,475 unaccompanied minors it apprehended at the U.S. border

The Verge: Some candidates are blocked from buying ads on Facebook while waiting on authorization codes

Techdirt: Amazon Alexa instantaneously justifies years of surveillance paranoia

Activist Post: Families of MK Ultra victims file lawsuit over government mind control experiments

Cato: TSA still awful after 17 years

Truthdig: The ‘butterfly effect’ of nuclear war

JIM BOVARD: Your tax dollars bankroll Afghan child-molesters

Scientific American: What are the limits of manipulating nature?

From Last Words:

“ONE of the merits of democracy is quite obvious: it is perhaps the most charming form of government ever devised by man. The reason is not far to seek. It is based upon propositions that are palpably not true—and what is not true, as everyone knows, is always immensely more fascinating and satisfying to the vast majority of men than what is true. Truth has a harshness that alarms them, and an air of finality that collides with their incurable romanticism. They turn, in all the great emergencies of life, to the ancient promises, transparently false but immensely comforting, and of all those ancient promises there is none more comforting than the one to the effect that the lowly shall inherit the earth. It is at the bottom of the dominant religious system of the modern world, and it is at the bottom of the dominant political system. Democracy gives it a certain appearance of objective and demonstrable truth. The mob man, functioning as citizen, gets a feeling that he is really important to the world—that he is genuinely running things. Out of his maudlin herding after rogues and mountebanks there comes to him a sense of vast and mysterious power—which is what makes archbishops, police sergeants and other such magnificoes happy. And out of it there comes, too, a conviction that he is somehow wise, that his views are taken seriously by his betters—which is what makes United States Senators, fortune-tellers and Young Intellectuals happy. Finally, there comes out of it a glowing consciousness of a high duty triumphantly done—which is what makes hangmen and husbands happy.”

I’m all for bringing back monarchy, where at least then the State didn’t pretend to be anything other than what it was.  Democracy rests on the painfully obvious falsity that “we are the government”. Monarchies clearly know what they are and what they represent.  Their lack of pretension gives monarchies an elegance and beauty that democracies lack.  And, as history has shown, those States that have cloaked themselves in the propaganda that they were really “the people” are those that have slaughtered more of their own people than any other.  Think Russia, China, Cuba, etc.  Governments most given over to the “the people are the government” fiction are without fail always the most totalitarian.  Hans Hermanne-Hoppe’s Democracy, the God That Failed, a book that deserves to be quoted here occasionally, taught us that only during the age of “democracy” and the elimination of monarchy did the age of total war begin.  We are not the government. We are not our jailers, we are not the monopoly on the use of violence.  We are citizens separate from the State, and that understanding is indispensable to our control over the State.

The Verge: Orlando police scramble to defend Amazon facial recognition pilot

Human Rights Watch: Are US police disclosing use of Amazon’s facial recognition technology?

The Week: Beware the new military-technology complex

The Federalist: The FBI used its secret spy program to protect killers, jail innocents, and screw victims

Antiwar.com: House passes $717 billion military spending bill

Reason: NFL’s national anthem policy exposes free speech hypocrisy of Right, Left, and Trump Ed: Mandatory displays of respect for the symbols of the State is a symptom of fascism.

ACLU: We’re demanding the government come clean on surveillance of social media

Libertarian Institute: Cop siccs K9 on driver who politely refuses to answer questions Ed: There is video, and it is as ugly and insane as you’d imagine.

The Nation: America’s “War on Terror” has cost taxpayers $5.6 trillion

GARETH PORTER: How corporate media are undermining a US-North Korea nuclear weapons deal

FEE: U.S. schools don’t measure up, and polling shows Republicans and Democrats know it

World Socialist Website: US primaries: Military-intelligence candidates win four Democratic congressional nominations

Boing Boing: Alexa listened to a couple’s conversation and sent it to the husband’s employer without permission

Engadget: Google will always do evil

High Times: Arizona Supreme Court rules medical marijuana legal on college campuses

Truthdig: Security troops at US nuclear missile base took LSD, records show

Motherboard: The Pentagon releases new documents about the ‘tic-tac’ UFO

The Telegraph: Amazon defends marketing facial recognition tool to police amid privacy concerns

Ars Technica: Police use of Amazon’s face-recognition service draws privacy warnings: “Cloud-based service can index millions of faces and recognize 100 people in an image.”

Wired: Few rules govern police use of facial-recognition technology

NBC: Your DNA is the next big privacy battleground

National Review: Report: FBI greatly overestimated threat posed by encrypted cell phones

Techdirt: The attorney general thinks police having to follow the Constitution leads to violent crime increases

The Atlantic: The undemocratic spread of Big Brother: “Year by year, for the foreseeable future, surveillance hardware and software will keep improving, extracting ever more information. Threats to privacy will proliferate. Communities will theoretically be able to choose whether or not their police officers make use of a given piece of new technology. But in practice, if the status quo persists, even the most intrusive innovations that portend the most radical changes in society will be quietly adopted without public notice or debate or votes that force elected officials to be accountable. The cops will just press ahead without asking permission.”

The Intercept: With Medal of Honor, Seal Team 6 rewards a culture of war crimes

The American Conservative: The Saudi lobby’s scheme to destroy the Iran deal

Also The Intercept: One teen and three FBI operatives: Was the government behind a 17-year old’s terror plot in Texas?

FEE: How media outlets misinform the public about teacher pay

Reason: Firefighter earned $300,000 in overtime by working more hours than actually exist

Ars Technica: NASA’s EM Drive fails actual testing

LiveScience: Archaeologists find shipwreck with stash worth up to $17 billion

BoingBoing: Depression: the psychedelic cure

From a 2016 post at the blog of Boston psychology professor Dr. Peter Gray on a topic I think about more and more now that I’ve seen up close how the continuous, inescapable stressor that is public school life (i.e. pushy, condescending instructors who train kids to take certain tests well) can have on a shy, sensitive child:

“Children now often spend more time at school and at homework than their parents spend at their full-time jobs, and the work of schooling is often more burdensome and stress-inducing than that of a typical adult job. A century ago we came to the conclusion that full-time child labor was child abuse, so we outlawed it; but now school is the equivalent of full-time child labor. The increased time, tedium, and stress of schooling is bringing many kids to the breaking point or beyond, and more and more people are becoming aware of that. It can no longer be believed that schooling is a benign experience for children. The evidence that it induces pathology is overwhelming.”

It’s always nice when I can find a good quote from a book on my Kindle, because I can then do a simple cut-paste here.  In some cases, like this one, I must pull out the physical book from my collection of dusty, decades-old, ex-library books, and painstakingly type up the quote myself.  The book in question is ‘The State of the Union’, Liberty Fund Edition, a priceless collection of political and cultural essays by my favorite writer, Albert Jay Nock.  The essay from which the quote is derived is ‘Liberalism, properly so called’, a Nockian history of how the meaning of the term ‘liberal’ was twisted from its original meaning of the expansion of free choice, a removal of State power from as many areas of life as humanly possible, to it’s exact opposite: the use of the coercive power of the State to force societal change in desired directions:

“Liberalism…contemplated a type of society organised around a system of voluntary cooperation; a system of original contract, free contract. This system is best illustrated by the example of an industrial concern like the Standard Oil Company. The individual need not work for Standard Oil unless he wishes to do so; he is not conscripted. His acceptance of the Company’s rules is a matter of free contract; he is not coerced; he may leave if he does not like them. His wages, hours and conditions of labor are fixed by consent; if they do not suit him as proposed, he is free to refuse them. Under this system the individual is regarded as the unit of ultimate value. The logic of this position was that society as a whole would gain more from the aggregate initiative and enterprise of groups pursuing various ends in free association and by such means as of free choice should seem best to them, than it would from the efforts of groups pursuing prescribed ends under coercion…

…Liberalism held that society’s work should be carried on, its responsibilities met, and its difficulties dealt with, by the application of social power, not governmental power; social power meaning the power generated and exercised by individuals and groups of individuals working in an economy which is free of governmental interference – an economy of free contract. This follows logically from the conception of government inherited from Whiggism in opposition to Toryism’s conception of it. Toryism held that the ruler derived his authority from God and distributed that authority to his agents in various degrees according to their function; therefore the agents exercised power by divine right ad hoc, responsible only to the ruler, who in turn was responsible only to God. Whiggism, on the contrary, regarded rulership as purely a civil institution established by the nation for the benefit of all its members, with no inherent power of its own, and responsible only to the nation…

…When the Whigs came into power they kept all the foregoing tenets in mind, and so did the early Liberals who succeeded them. They worked steadily towards curbing the government’s coercive power over the individual; and with such effect, as historians testify, that by the middle of the eighteenth century Englishmen had simply forgotten that there was ever a time when the full “liberty of the subject” was not theirs to enjoy. In this connexion the thing to be remarked is that the Whigs proceeded by the negative method of repealing existing laws, not by the positive method of making new ones. They combed the Statute-book, and when they found a statute which bore against “the liberty of the subject” they simply repealed it and left the page blank. This purgation ran up into the thousands. In 1873 the secretary of the Law Society estimated that out of the 18,110 Acts which had been passed since the reign of Henry III, four-fifths had been wholly or partially repealed. The thing to be observed here is that this negative method of simple repeal left free scope for the sanative processes of natural law in dealing with all manner of social dislocations and disabilities. These processes are slow and usually painful, and impatience with them leads to popular demand that the government should step in and anticipate them by positive statutory intervention when anything goes wrong. The Liberals were aware that no one, least of all the “practical” politician, can foresee the ultimate effects, or even all the collateral effects, of such interventions, or can calculate the force of their political momentum. Thus it regularly happens that they bring about ultimate evils which are not only far more serious than the specific evils which they were meant to remedy, but are also wholly unexpected. American legislative history in the last two decades shows any number of conspicuous instances where the political short-cut of positive intervention has been taken towards remedying a present evil at the most reckless expense of future good. The Prohibition Amendment is perhaps the most conspicuous of these instances.”

BoingBoing: New York high school will use CCTV and facial recognition to enforce discipline

The Hill: TSA creates secret watch list of people who may be “unruly” Ed: Meaning any behavior in the airport not indicative of a cowed peon probably. Never should’ve given those idiots badges, even if they’re fake.

Slate: The LocationSmart scandal is bigger than Cambridge Analytica. Here’s why no one is talking about it.

Gizmodo: The Pentagon’s controversial drone AI-imaging project extends beyond Google

The Hill: Big Tech vacuums up our kids’ data, risking their privacy and mental health

High Times: De Blasio orders NYPD to stop arresting people for smoking weed

Reason: NYPD union rep complains that he’s increasingly afraid to arrest people for no good reason

Washington Times: Trump gets FBI, Justice Department to probe claims of spying on his 2016 campaign

The Intercept: The FBI informant who monitored the Trump campaign, Stefan Halper, oversaw a CIA spying operation in the 1980 Presidential campaign

The Intercept: Blacklisted academic Norman Finkelstein on Gaza, “the world’s largest concentration camp”

Military.com: Military helicopter drops ammo on school, busts hole in roof

CNET: Google stands to lose up to $4.3 billion in UK privacy suit

CityScoop: Meet the Israeli company ready to sell city-wide surveillance

Tech Crunch: A simple solution to the encryption debate

Engadget: NASA will create the coldest place in the universe to study quantum physics

Never thought I’d come across this headline: The American Conservative: The sad decline of Barnes & Noble

Vox: Why psychedelic drugs could transform how we treat depression and mental illness

Boing Boing: News crew discovers 40 cell-phone tracking devices operating around Washington D.C.

Activist Post: State sets massive precedent, passes law to effectively ban the NSA

Bloomberg: The U.S. Army is turning to robot soldiers

McClatchyDC: Pasteurization without representation? Kentucky lawmaker wants to boost raw milk

FEE: California (hopefully) learns a lesson about marijuana taxes and the Laffer Curve

Denver Post: Denver police draw guns on charter school staff member in class during search for absent student

Zero Hedge: How the FBI and CIA restarted the Cold War to protect themselves

Tech Crunch: Are algorithms hacking our thoughts?

The Sun: Your future home will be able to detect your moods and if you’re hungry Ed: I remain unconvinced that this future must be inevitable, where our every appliance, including our car and home, anticipates and satisfies every need or discomfort, with virtually no input of our own. Rather than an advance in technology, this focus on “connected” homes, cars, appliances, etc., feels like more of a detour from the practical application of science and engineering rather than the . Social media and new gadgets feel more like ‘bread and circuses’ used to siphon and exploit the data we produce daily rather than real technological advance. It’s not neo-Luddism to oppose new and more insidious ways to slurp up our personal choices and lives. The companies comprising “Big Tech” are really any but, with virtually every company being nothing more than glorified surveillance outfits that gather, and then sell, our data.  The danger is the confluence of factors that are combining to create the most far-reaching surveillance state that’s ever existed.

“Connectedness”, convenience, instant gratification, social validation, are what these companies are selling, not the future.  The important point to always remember is that it won’t be your home that will be taking care of your every need, it will be Google, or Amazon, or whichever company is behind the new “smart house” that’s draining your autonomy and self-reliance.

From his essay, Why I’m Not a Conservative:

“This brings me to the first point on which the conservative and the liberal dispositions
differ radically. As has often been acknowledged by conservative writers, one of the
fundamental traits of the conservative attitude is a fear of change, a timid distrust of the
new as such,[5] while the liberal position is based on courage and confidence, on a
preparedness to let change run its course even if we cannot predict where it will lead.
There would not be much to object to if the conservatives merely disliked too rapid
change in institutions and public policy; here the case for caution and slow process is
indeed strong. But the conservatives are inclined to use the powers of government to
prevent change or to limit its rate to whatever appeals to the more timid mind. In looking
forward, they lack the faith in the spontaneous forces of adjustment which makes the
liberal accept changes without apprehension, even though he does not know how the
necessary adaptations will be brought about. It is, indeed, part of the liberal attitude to
assume that, especially in the economic field, the self-regulating forces of the market will
somehow bring about the required adjustments to new conditions, although no one can
foretell how they will do this in a particular instance. There is perhaps no single factor
contributing so much to people’s frequent reluctance to let the market work as their
inability to conceive how some necessary balance, between demand and supply, between
exports and imports, or the like, will be brought about without deliberate control. The
conservative feels safe and content only if he is assured that some higher wisdom watches
and supervises change, only if he knows that some authority is charged with keeping the
change “orderly.”
This fear of trusting uncontrolled social forces is closely related to two other
characteristics of conservatism: its fondness for authority and its lack of understanding of
economic forces. Since it distrusts both abstract theories and general principles,[6] it
neither understands those spontaneous forces on which a policy of freedom relies nor
possesses a basis for formulating principles of policy. Order appears to the conservative
as the result of the continuous attention of authority, which, for this purpose, must be
allowed to do what is required by the particular circumstances and not be tied to rigid
rule. A commitment to principles presupposes an understanding of the general forces by
which the efforts of society are co-ordinated, but it is such a theory of society and 

especially of the economic mechanism that conservatism conspicuously lacks. So
unproductive has conservatism been in producing a general conception of how a social
order is maintained that its modern votaries, in trying to construct a theoretical
foundation, invariably find themselves appealing almost exclusively to authors who
regarded themselves as liberal. Macaulay, Tocqueville, Lord Acton, and Lecky certainly
considered themselves liberals, and with justice; and even Edmund Burke remained an
Old Whig to the end and would have shuddered at the thought of being regarded as a
Tory.”