REPUBLIC REBORN

I called it: Gizmodo: Google removes “Don’t be evil” from it’s code of conduct

World Socialist Website: Google, drone murder, and the military-industrial-censorship complex

National Review: America’s flood of opioid orphans

The Federalist: DOJ frets about source outing while deliberately outing source

Volokh Conspiracy: Google now deindexing some web pages based on the FDA’s administrative agency findings

Engadget: FCC will investigate sketchy location tracking company

Activist Post: Police use spying doorbells to create digital neighborhood watch

The Intercept: Call Congress’s “Blue Lives Matter” bills what they are: another attack on black lives Ed: Not merely black lives, but an attack on all lives not protected by a badge.

Boing Boing: Student debt crisis watch: pay $18,000 of your $24,000 loan, owe $24,000

Digest: Chess grandmasters show the same longevity advantage as elite athletes

Forbes: What counts as a Schroedinger’s Cat?

EFF: Oakland: The new gold standard in community control of police surveillance

LA Times: New ‘zero tolerance’ immigration crackdown fills border courts

New York Times: When cops ‘steal’ drugs, the results can spin out of control

The Intercept: How my cannabis prescription made me realize that weed should be decriminalized

The Verge: Google’s Selfish Ledger is an unsettling vision of Silicon Valley social engineering

Futurism: The U.S. Department of Justice clearly knows how creepy cell phone surveillance ‘stingrays’ are

The Intercept: U.S. Navy reserve doctor on Gina Haspel torture victim: “One of the most severely traumatized individuals I have ever seen.”

Harper’s: Combat high: America’s addiction to war

Antiwar.com: The Korean massacre the U.S. needs to apologize for

Mashable: Chinese school turns to facial recognition to see if students are paying attention

The Federalist: If the “intellectual dark web” is questionable, so is the New York Times

Truthdig: Blaming the victims of Israel’s Gaza massacre

Reason: In win for father’s rights, Kentucky says judges must presume shared parenting in child custody cases

Don’t call it a liveblog, but I will attempt to post quotes from Hayek’s Law, Legislation, and Liberty a bit more chronologically. And here is one, from Chapter 1 of the first book:

“Many of the institutions of society which are indispensable conditions for the successful pursuit of our conscious aims are in fact the result of customs, habits or practices which have been neither invented nor are observed with any such purpose in view. We live in a society in which we can successfully orientate ourselves, and in which our actions have a good chance of achieving their aims, not only because our fellows are governed by known aims or known connections between means and ends, but because they are also confined by rules whose purpose or origin we often do not know and of whose very existence we are often not aware.

Man is as much a rule-following animal as a purpose-seeking one. And he is successful not because he knows why he ought to observe the rules which he does observe, or is even capable of stating all these rules in words, but because his thinking and acting are governed by rules which have by a process of selection been evolved in the society in which he lives, and which are thus the product of the experience of generations.”

Hayek’s use of the language of evolution to describe the formation and change of social order has always been appealing to me, but it’s not original to him. Evolution was a theme to Hayek’s chief influencers, Smith, Hume, Ferguson, and the rest of the Scottish Enlightenment.  Charles Darwin himself even took the ideas of evolution in the social sphere and applied it to the natural world.

Engadget: The company that helps police track cell phones was reportedly hacked

Fair: CNN’s Iran fearmongering would make more sense coming directly from the Pentagon

The Intercept: Gazans have the right to invade Israel, at least if you believe one of Israel’s justification for the Six-Day War

WSWS: Conspiracy emerges to push Julian Assange into British and U.S. hands

Reason: Deputy who failed to engage Parkland shooter gets $104,000 annual pension for life

Techdirt: Congressional members decide it’s time to make assaulting a police officer a federal hate crime

The American Conservative: When UN peacekeeping goes horribly wrong

JAMES BOVARD: Spare me the claims that Gina Haspel will ‘speak truth to power’. Real truth-tellers go to jail.

FEE: The essential difference between liberty-lovers and big-government types is political tolerance

BoingBoing: US Air Force offers $5,000 reward for belt of grenades lost in North Dakota

Where is Isaac Asimov when you need him: The Verge: New Toronto Declaration calls on algorithms to respect human rights

TIME: This will change your mind about psychedelic drugs

Long quote from Chapter 1 of his book, The War of Art: 

“There’s a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don’t, and the secret is this: It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write. What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance.

Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.

Have you ever brought home a treadmill and let it gather dust in the attic? Ever quit a diet, a course of yoga, a meditation practice? Have you ever bailed out on a call to embark upon a spiritual practice, dedicate yourself to a humanitarian calling, commit your life to the service of others? Have you ever wanted to be a mother, a doctor, an advocate for the weak and helpless; to run for office, crusade for the planet, campaign for world peace, or to preserve the environment? Late at night have you experienced a vision of the person you might become, the work you could accomplish, the realized being you were meant to be? Are you a writer who doesn’t write, a painter who doesn’t paint, an entrepreneur who never starts a venture? Then you know what Resistance is.

Resistance is the most toxic force on the planet. It is the root of more unhappiness than poverty, disease, and erectile dysfunction. To yield to Resistance deforms our spirit. It stunts us and makes us less than we are and were born to be. If you believe in God (and I do) you must declare Resistance evil, for it prevents us from achieving the life God intended when He endowed each of us with our own unique genius. Genius is a Latin word; the Romans used it to denote an inner spirit, holy and inviolable, which watches over us, guiding us to our calling. A writer writes with his genius; an artist paints with hers; everyone who creates operates from this sacramental center. It is our soul’s seat, the vessel that holds our being-in-potential, our star’s beacon and Polaris.

Every sun casts a shadow, and genius’s shadow is Resistance. As powerful as is our soul’s call to realization, so potent are the forces of Resistance arrayed against it. Resistance is faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, harder to kick than crack cocaine. We’re not alone if we’ve been mowed down by Resistance; millions of good men and women have bitten the dust before us.”

Defense One: The Border Patrol’s ‘Constitution-Free Zone’ is probably bigger than you think

The Verge: Ecuador reportedly spent $5 million protecting–and spying on–Julian Assange

EFF: The Supreme Court says your expectation of privacy probably shouldn’t depend on the fine print

The Nation: The CIA didn’t just torture. It experimented on human beings.

The Intercept: Ahead of vote on Gina Haspel, Senate pulls access to damning classified memo

Techdirt: Bill introduced to prevent government agencies from demanding encryption backdoors

Ars Technica: Ex-CIA employee identified but not charged in Vault 7 leak of hacking tools

Washington Post: Nothing says ‘peace’ like 58 dead Palestinians

Antiwar.com: US blocks UN probe into Gaza deaths

Activist Post: If any other country was shooting civilians like Israel, the US would be calling for invasion by now

New York Times: The legacy of stop-and-frisk in New York’s marijuana arrests

The Atlantic: Big Pharma gets a big win from Trump

FEE: Why words like ‘racist’ and ‘fascist’ are losing their power, and why that’s a bad thing

The Atlantic: A new theory linking sleep and creativity Ed: As someone afflicted with an extreme form of sleepwalking, I find all research on sleep fascinating.

Quanta: A new world’s extraordinary orbit points to planet nine

High Times: New study finds alcohol, tobacco the most lethal substances worldwide

Business Insider: A best-selling author tried LSD, magic mushrooms, and DMT, and wrote about all 3 experiences

From Chapter 2 of The Constitution of Liberty: 

“The rationalist who desires to subject everything to human reason is thus faced with a real dilemma. The use of reason aims at control and predictability. But the process of the advance of reason rests on freedom and the unpredictability of human action. Those who extol the powers of human reason usually see only one side of that interaction of human thought and conduct in which reason is at the same time used and shaped. They do not see that, for advance to take place, the social process from which the growth of reason emerges must remain free from its control.

There can be little doubt that man owes some of his greatest successes in the past to the fact that he has not been able to control social life. His continued advance may well depend on his deliberately refraining from exercising controls which are now in his power. In the past, the spontaneous forces of growth, however much restricted, could usually still assert themselves against the organized coercion of the state. With the technological means of control now at the disposal of government, it is not certain that such assertion is still possible; at any rate, it may soon become impossible. We are not far from the point where the deliberately organized forces of society may destroy those spontaneous forces which have made advance possible.”

Slate: How cities are reining in out-of-control policing tech

TechSpot: Google employees are reportedly quitting over Pentagon drone partnership

Bloomberg: Facebook faulted by judge for “troubling theme” in privacy case

GovTech: Crowdsourcing surveillance? Newark, New Jersey’s new policing program raises concerns

Quartz: An Australian regulator is investigating whether Google is spying on the country’s Android users

Boing Boing: London cops are using an unregulated, 98% inaccurate facial recognition tech

EFF: Victory in Alasaad for our digital privacy at the border

CNN: Supreme Court upholds privacy rights for unauthorized rental car drivers in search and seizure case

ACLU: Hollywood offers ominous visions of facial recognition’s future

Washington Post: Illinois police: Keep pot illegal or we’ll kill our dogs

Truthdig: The Pentagon can’t account for $21 trillion (That’s not a typo)

McClatchyDC: Judge wants to know who’s spying on Guantanamo defense attorneys

DAVID FRENCH: Of course America’s too big to govern

JUSTIN RAIMONDO: Kim Jong Un: The commie who came in from the cold

The American Conservative: Was there ever even an Iranian nuclear program?

New York Times: Surest way to face marijuana charges in New York: be black or Hispanic

OC Register: Training kills more troops than war. What can be done?

High Times: British medical journal advocates for decriminalizing all drugs

OregonLive: First, marijuana. Are magic mushrooms next?

Gizmodo: Thousands of gamers help to prove Einstein wrong

Despite despising the unfettered market economy, he nevertheless developed revolutionary theories on radical uncertainty, ideas that greatly affected writers like G.L.S. Shackle, Ludwig Lachmann, and much later, Nassim Taleb, who then took his ideas farther than he ever could. This is from his General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money:

“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”