REPUBLIC REBORN

A flurry of good pieces from The Intercept:

• Business is booming for U.K.’s spy tech industry
• Experts say keep Amazon’s Alexa away from your kids
• U.S. moves forward with multibillion-dollar “smart bomb” sale to Saudi Arabia and UAE despite Yemen civilian deaths

New York Times: Silicon Valley faces regulatory fight on its own turf

Seattle Times: ‘Smart’ meters in Washington state: convenience or potential invasion of privacy?

Nextgov: Boston Dynamics is going to start selling its creepy robots in 2019

Reason: In the U.S., there are 219,000 women behind bars

Washington Post: Parkland school officials refuse to release surveillance footage, continue lying to parents

The American Conservative: D.C. couldn’t beat Syria’s Assad, so it will punish his people

National Review: A powerful legal group changes the law while nobody’s looking

Cato: Immigrants consume less welfare than native-born Americans: Study

STEVE HORWITZ: The grocery store as an indicator of American progress 

Big Think: Silicon Valley’s long obsession with LSD

VICE: What it’s like to take ayahuasca at a psychedelic healing retreat

Foreign Policy: Inside the cutthroat world of billion-dollar military supply contracts

Boing Boing: Cops have a secret, unaccountable system for tracking you buy your cell phone, and they abuse it like crazy

Fortune: Facebook, Uber, and the trouble with ‘God View’

Engadget: Lawmakers want to know how Amazon protects Echo Dot’s child users

The Intercept: Oliver North worked with cocaine traffickers to arm terrorists. Now he’ll be president of the NRA. Ed: I’ve never had a good feeling about the NRA, mainly due to the bleeding over of its politics into authoritarian positions on matters like the war on drugs, the war on terrorism, religion, blind cop worship, blind military worship, etc.  Gun Owners of America is a far better organization.

WSWS: Ecuador hints it may hand over Julian Assange to Britain and the US

Forbes: Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth is up $13 billion since privacy scandal

Cato: Protectionism and trade barriers aren’t just bad economics, they’re also immoral

The Guardian: Scientists to grow ‘mini-brains’ using Neanderthal DNA

ACLU: For the second time in 2 days, federal court upholds privacy rights at the border

Techdirt: FBI agents can be held accountable for tossing immigrants on the no-fly list for refusing to be informants

Activist Post: Federal appeals court in Virginia rules Feds cannot search electronic devices without a warrant

Gizmodo: A telecom loophole lets this shady company give anyone’s location to the cops

JUSTIN RAIMONDO: Iran deal exit: America First, or Israel First?

Ars Technica: AI trained to navigate develops brain-like location tracking

Mises: The utter failure of America’s system of Indian reservations

Eric Peters is an amazing writer. He reviews cars and offers up his opinion on the auto industry from a libertarian perspective. He’s like the Mencken of car criticism, and in a recent article he unmasks Elon Musk as just another crony addicted to handouts, and riding the electric car hype train:

“When financial analyst Toni Sacconaghi of Sanford C. Bernstein asked Tesla CEO Elon Musk about the money-losing electric car company’s capital requirements going forward (Tesla has burned through – cue Dr. Evil – one billion dollars in three of the last four quarters) Musk replied: “Boring, bonehead questions are not cool. Next?””

…”Neither man gives a damn about the damage – human or financial – imposed on others. Nor that others are made to pay for it all. They don’t even give lip service to pretending  anything they do bothers them in the least. All that matters is the Great Dream – whether it’s “regime change” in some resource-rich country which hasn’t attacked us (a war crime, once upon a time) or this equally demented business of manufacturing electric cars that almost no one would freely buy absent the subsidies and mandates.”

And this nugget: “Another analyst, Joe Spak of RBC Capital Markets, had the audacity to ask Elon a question relating to the true cost of the Model 3 – production of which is also nothing close to what Elon promised, but never mind that.

“Boring. Next,” came the reply.

With good reason. Move way from that one as quickly as possible.”

Here’s some headlines to consider:

Elon Musk’s growing empire is fueled by$4.9 billion in government in government subsidies

If Tesla is worth more than GM, why are taxpayers still subsidizing it?

It looks like the state of California is bailing out Tesla

Musk is nothing more than another crony at the public trough, just one that’s unusually good at publicity stunts.

And who knows, maybe in the near future we’ll see Tesla tanks equipped with Google AI driving through Third World villages and mowing down the inhabitants.

What a grim irony it is to see Google, the company that claimed ‘Don’t be evil‘ as its official motto and code of conduct, only to jump swiftly at the opportunity to equip the Pentagon’s combat drones with it’s DeepMind artificial intelligence.  These are the same drones that murder far more innocent civilians than “militants”, whatever the hell that means, and are running wild all over the Third World.  To their credit, over 3,000 Google employees, citing the ‘Don’t be evil’ motto, demanded that their employer end contract work with the Pentagon.

Google, in effect, has become just the latest cog in the military-industrial complex churning out machines of war to be deployed in the various endless wars that our government is currently engaged in.  One can imagine Google drones flying over Syria soon, and even Iran.

I believe that almost everyone, and every company has a price, but at least drop the sanctimony. Evil is in the eye of the beholder, and when the price is right, that term can become almost infinitely elastic.  It can even be twisted to mean its opposite.

What we have to fear most are people with tremendous power over our lives and who also believe they have the ability to distinguish between good and evil.

I was reminded of Google’s ridiculous motto while watching the eighth episode of season 3 of the tragically cancelled greatest show on television, Ash vs. the Evil Dead. Shotgun-and-chainsaw wielding slacker Ash Williams, upon seeing his teenage daughter’s fear and hopelessness as they are being dragged to Hell inside his Delta 88, reminds her, “Evil is not the boss of us!”, before gunning the car up out of the reach of the Deadites, plowing over the Grim Reaper himself, and reaching safety. Again, a tragedy that the show was cancelled.

“Don’t be evil” is only sincere when citizens use it to chide their own government and the architects of the Surveillance State that are in the Pentagon’s pocket. Government is the entity that is supposed to be residing in a Constitutionally-erected prison, because, if not, they will build one around us, and use power-and-money hungry dipshits in companies like Google to accomplish it.

The Guardian: Border agents can’t search your phone without good reason, U.S. court rules

Reuters: CIA secrets will limit senators’ questions to Trump nominee Haspel

The Federalist: It’s not Sci-Fi: China is developing tech that can mold U.S. kids’ minds

Common Dreams: CNN’s Iran fearmongering would make more sense coming directly from Pentagon

Reason: Pulling out of Iran deal could endanger U.S. troops

FEE: Starbucks is the latest victim of pseudoscience

DAVID STOCKMAN: The Donald’s done–The Deep State wins its war on ‘America First’

THOMAS KNAPP: The Iran nuclear deal isn’t just a good idea, it’s the law

JAMES BOVARD: Washington secrecy is creating a know-nothing democracy

Salon: What if we considered police killings a public health crisis? : “Police killings, often times driven by racial bias, have become an all-too-familiar American narrative. Indeed, a new study published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health validates what many have speculated: “Police violence disproportionately impacts young people, and the young people affected are disproportionately people of color.”

Researchers landed on the conclusion through a different approach to quantifying the tragedies of lives lost to police killings. Rather than looking merely at the stated number of deaths, they used a public health calculation that is often used to approximate the impact of a disease — thus comparing deaths of police killings to a public health crisis.”

Techdirt: Cops ‘help’ naked, possibly-suicidal, schizophrenic man by tasing him to death

CityLab: Inside the secret cities that created the atomic bomb

Tulsa World: OSU professor compares Oklahoma’s medical marijuana state question to other states’ laws

Slate: The US government’s secret inventions

Military Times: Psychedelic drug provides relief for veterans for PTSD

Reason: Europe’s new data privacy rules will make Facebook and Google more powerful

Gizmodo: The LAPD used Palantir tech to predict and surveil “probable offenders”

Techdirt: Podcast: How the courts created the Surveillance State

City Lab: The metro stations of Sao Paulo that read your face

Ars Technica: How a suspected drug dealer’s traffic stop led to a crucial privacy case

National Interest Online: China’s surveillance system can scan population in 1 second

High Times: FDA-approved study of marijuana for vets with PTSD begins phase 2

Reason: Illinois police dog trainer warns: We may euthanize our drug dogs if you legalize weed Ed: The drug war is a jobs program and an excuse to use spy tech on the innocent, and this parasite would most certainly be out of a job if marijuana were to be legalized.

The Intercept: Trump violates Iran nuclear deal–ignoring US and Israeli generals who support it

Cato: Kill the Iran deal, open Pandora’s Box

The American Conservative: Gina Haspel and how torture deceived us into Iraq

KIRIAKOU: Gina Haspel debate highlights America’s soul sickness

Futurism: Encrypted genomic data means people can participate in research without sacrificing privacy

FEE: A lot of people agree with a supervillian about population

Engadget: Pretty sure Google’s talking AI just beat a Turing test

Aeon: The techno dystopia of a Slovenian glass factory is a timeless mashup of people and machines

Contemporary and literary peer to H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith (distant relative? Probably too much to hope for) produced hundreds of poems and short stories in the ‘cosmic fantasy’ vein of Lovecraft, and in many ways far surpassed him in imagination and style.  Yet Smith remains virtually unknown today, which seems strange once you read his ‘The Dark Eidolon’, and realize that Lovecraft himself considered Smith the master of the ‘cosmic weird’ fiction they both published.

And now for an excerpt of what you didn’t realize you needed, from To The Daemon:

“Tell me many tales, O benign maleficent daemon, but tell me none that I have ever heard or have even dreamt of otherwise than obscurely or infrequently. Nay, tell me not of anything that lies between the bourns of time or the limits of space: for I am a little weary of all recorded years and charted lands; and the isles that are westward of Cathay, and the sunset realms of Ind, are not remote enough to be made the abiding-place of my conceptions; and Atlantis is over-new for my thoughts to sojourn there, and Mu itself has gazed upon the sun in aeons that are too recent,

Tell me many tales, but let them be of things that are past the lore of legend and of which there are no myths in our world or any world adjoining. Tell me, if you will, of the years when the moon was young, with siren-rippled seas and mountains that were zoned with flowers from base to summit; tell me of the planets gray with eld, of the worlds whereon no mortal astronomer has ever looked, and whose mystic heavens and horizons have given pause to visionaries. Tell me of the vaster blossoms within whose cradling chalices a woman could sleep; of the seas of fire that beat on strands of ever-during ice; of perfumes that can give eternal slumber in a breath; of eyeless titans that dwell in Uranus, and beings that wander in the green light of the twin suns of azure and orange. Tell me tales of inconceivable fear and unimaginable love, in orbs whereto our sun is a nameless star, or unto which its rays have never reached.”

A few years ago I wrote an article for FEE entitled, ‘Obamacare and Hayek’s crystals‘, that sunk like a lead weight. Despite that, I was proud of the fact that it even saw the light of day on that vaunted publication’s front page.  The editor urged me to make the article “relevant”, so I threw in some BS about Obamacare, although I didn’t really care about the specifics of that policy for the purpose of the article.  My main purpose in writing it was to draw attention to a passage in Hayek’s first volume of Law, Legislation, and Liberty that I had never before seen mentioned.  That passage referred to the purpose of a maker of public policy when dealing with a spontaneous order, where Hayek likened that order to a crystal, and the policy maker to a scientist in a lab whose goal it is to create such a crystal.  The scientist doesn’t construct a crystal, atom by atom, but creates an environment conducive for the formation of a crystal.  In the same way, lawmakers must be mindful of how to encourage the flourishing of society: by crafting law that allows the spontaneous order to allocate, innovate, and evolve. Here’s part of the passage in question, from Chapter 2:

“It will be instructive to consider briefly the character of some spontaneous orders which we find in nature, since here some of their characteristic properties stand out most clearly. There are in the physical world many instances of complex orders which we could bring about only by availing ourselves of the known forces which tend to lead to their formation, and never by deliberately placing each element in the appropriate position. We can never produce a crystal or a complex organic compound by placing the individual atoms in such a position that they will form the lattice of a crystal or the system based on benzol rings which make up an organic compound. But we can create the conditions in which they will arrange themselves in such a manner.”

This is far more profound than Hayek has been given credit for.  A spontaneous order is the result of millions of daily, uncoerced decisions by countless, anonymous individuals.  The preservation of that order means the protection, and expansion, of the individual’s sphere of choice.  The protection of our freedom to choose is the sole worthwhile task of the policy maker.  Unfortunately, most policy makers are impatient in the extreme when it comes to social change, and advocate government coercion to force change onto society more quickly than it is ready to accept.  And it never ends well.

FEE: Local cops can skirt state limits on surveillance by joining federal task forces Ed: Communities must place a firewall around their police forces, preventing outside control or influence.  Their funds must come solely from the community they serve, because, like everyone else in the world, police are loyal to the source of their revenue.  It’s the same argument against foreign aid: the money separates the foreign government from its people.  The position of sheriff, more than probably any other in the country, must be isolated not only from federal money and influence, but also from extensive collaboration with other sheriffs.  The sheriff must be independent of every individual and institution except for his or her community.  It’s the only check on an expansive, law-skirting surveillance state.  That the surveillance state is easily expanding into every jurisdiction in America is proof at how little “independence” is being forced on not only our sheriffs but also local district attorneys.

ACLU: 4 things to be worried about in the NSA’s new transparency report

Techdirt: Oakland residents now protected by the ‘strongest’ surveillance oversight laws in the country

The American Conservative: The conservative case against CIA pick Gina Haspel : “I have no doubt that she considers herself to be a patriot, as her supporters do. But that’s not the issue here. The issue is respect for the rule of law. Since the end of World War II, we have had laws in this country that specifically ban exactly those torture techniques implemented and overseen by Gina Haspel at a secret prison overseas. And the United States is a signatory to the United Nations Convention Against Torture. Indeed, we were the primary drafters of that measure, which, having been ratified by the Senate, has the force of law in the United States.

If Gina Haspel had any doubts about her “orders” from the CIA hierarchy, she had only to look at recent history. Just after the end of World War II, the United States executed Japanese soldiers who had waterboarded American prisoners of war. Similarly, in January 1968, the Washington Post published a front-page photo of an American soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ordered an investigation. The soldier was arrested, charged with torture, convicted, and sentenced to 20 years at Leavenworth.”

Ed: I think the case could be put in even simpler terms: an “enemy of the State” sounds dangerously flexible, and could be twisted to mean anything that government lawyers want it to.  Do we really want a government that is permitted to torture perceived enemies of the State?

USA Today: Don’t celebrate Karl Marx. His communism has a death count in the millions. Ed: His gospel of property abolition, put into effect, formed a chrysalis from which totalitarianism emerged shortly in such horrific purity as the world had never before seen.  The depths to which the human race could sink were plumbed deeply during the the 20th century, when governments slaughtered their unarmed, unresisting civilians on an industrial scale.  The number stands at 262 million.

Activist Post: “Good Morning America” experiment on kids and unrestricted screen time

The Week: China’s digital nightmare

National Review: Civil liberties can’t survive partisan hatred

A perspective we should think about Zero Hedge: Is social media destroying humanity on purpose?

Washington Post: The giant sucking sound of a debt spiral

CHRIS HEDGES: The danger of leadership cults

DAVID GORDON: Confessions of an auto-didact Ed: I met David Gordon at the Mises Institute during the summer of 2008 as a sophomore in college. What a fun guy.  I can’t believe it’s been a decade since attending Mises U. The class photo is still up!

Ars Technica: The material science of building a light sail to take us to Alpha Centauri