REPUBLIC REBORN

Welcome to the new visitors to this site.  As I’ve said before, this is a stripped-down news aggregation site with short commentary by someone with credentials that don’t stretch much beyond ‘concerned citizen’.  New content will be added throughout every day, along with short commentary. The main focus will be the rise of the Surveillance State, with an aim to killing it while its still wobbling about with the shell still on its head, before it realizes its potential.  We are rapidly approaching a point in time when it will no longer be possible to end total surveillance, when the interests of so many powerful groups are aligned in its favor that peaceful revolt will be impossible.

My previous writing has been scattered to the digital winds, and covered a range of subjects.  All of my writing will now be confined to this space, and focused almost exclusively on raising awareness of a rapidly expanding complex of total surveillance of every citizen by our own government.  It’s not conspiracy, it is fact.  On a daily basis, headlines proclaim the advance of the latest form of surveillance.  We must resist this normalization of the destruction of our privacy.

The fundamental motive for our resistance to total surveillance is one of mere survival.  During the 20th century, governments of the world murdered 262 million unarmed, unresisting civilians.  R.J. Rummel, the researcher who estimated this number, dubbed this hideous phenomenon “democide” and said that this total is 6 times the number of people killed in combat in every single war combined during that century.  This fact alone should be enough to convince most people to be “anti-government”.

We resist total surveillance because we resist the expansion of power of the most murderous institution devised by the human race: government itself.  While we need some method of enforcement of our laws and protection of our liberty, it should be recognized that once we place the monopoly on the use of violence within one institution, we have created the single greatest threat to our survival as a species.  This thing, once created, must be kept chained down.  But all of history has shown that every attempt to keep this institution shackled has failed.  It immediately surrounds itself with a religious aura, with symbols that must be worshipped.  And not to get too melodramatic, but this institution like no other demands reverence, hands over hearts, and sacrifices, whether in the form of a portion of our paychecks or a mortgage on the lives of our children and grandchildren.

I recently attended Oklahoma’s legislative session, and came away with several insights I hadn’t thought of before.  One: the State worships itself.  Specifically, there was a very long prayer recited before the bills were voted on.  While it was ostensibly directed at the Christian god, it was obvious to what institution this orison was directed.  Whatever was circling the air and infecting the minds and hearts of those in attendance was not a god of justice or mercy.  Heads were bowed and eyes closed in fealty and reverence to the granter of riches, to the man-made god of organized and institutionalized aggression.  Then came the hideous Pledge of Allegiance, progeny of State-worshipping Francis Bellamy’s sick mind, who also thought up what has been dubbed the ‘Bellamy Salute’, or a hand outstretched to the flag.  This is what we resist.

For the sake of the survival of the human race, we must retain the ability to hide from the State.  This is why we oppose total surveillance.  Once our every action, every movement, is catalogued, assessed, scrutinized, we stand completely vulnerable under the ancient, unblinking eye of the executioner of entire populations.

And so ends this caffeine-fuel screed.

Reason: Border Patrol agents don’t need Big Brother spying powers over Americans, but they want them anyway

Futurism: As drones become tools of war, companies turn to hacking them

Idaho Statesman: This Boise company will demonstrate how its tech can thwart a drone attack

Ars Technica: Facebook has been sharing our data for months to help study income inequality

VICE News: Neil Gorsuch is shaping up to be an unlikely defender of your privacy

Washington Examiner: Is it time to crack down on facial recognition tech?

Techdirt: Court sends cop back to prison for bogus ‘contempt of cop’ arrest

Eurasia Review: Germany launches intelligence satellite to escape US influence

Policy Options: Personal drones, AI, and our privacy

MultiBriefs: New developments in police technology

NextGov: Nvidia making facial recognition AI for smart city surveillance

The Verge: Here are some of the ways experts think AI might screw with us in the next five years

MIT Technology Review: The ‘Black Mirror’ scenarios that are leading some experts to call for more secrecy on AI

The Drive: Samsung just patented display drones controlled by your eyes, face, and hand gestures

Quartz: Artificial intelligence’s ‘paper-clip maximizer’ metaphor can explain humanity’s imminent doom

Ars Technica: Inching closer to a DNA-based file system

PAT BUCHANAN: Is that Russian troll farm really an act of war?

The Federalist: Is a former Feinstein staffer running Fusion GPS’s post-election Steel dossier operation?

Techdirt: NSA-created computer security exploit stolen by hackers now powering cryptocurrency mining malware

Bloomberg: The car of the future will sell your data

Telegraph: US preparing ‘bloody nose’ cyber attacks on North Korea

American Thinker: Why aren’t the media and other Democrats angry at the FBI for not doing their job instead of Trump for tweeting about it?

The Intercept: Blowback: How Israel went from helping create Hamas to bombing it

BestVPN: UK children subjected to invasive data retention

City Journal: Judgment day for public unions

Activist Post: End the War on Drugs for these very practical reasons

Washington Post: Taxing Americans out of its liberty

Mises: Security works at Disney—but can’t work at a public school?

Biometric Update: EFF calls for independent oversight and privacy protection in facial recognition report

City Journal: America’s missing $21 trillion

LA Times: The U.S. is no stranger to interfering in the elections of other countries

The American Conservative: Trump’s military parade: Toy soldiers made larger-than-life

Washington Post: AI ‘gaydar’ could compromise LGBTQ people’s privacy, safety

Ars Technica: Ketamine studies help zero in on roots of depression

High Times: 8 of the craziest weed conspiracies that might be true

The Intercept: For President’s Day, here’s one vicious, ghastly and/or fascinating fact about every US President  Ed: George Washington had dentures made from the teeth of the men and women he enslaved.  For Godssake.

Reason: A cure for mass shootings doesn’t exist

American Thinker: An emerging police state that spies on Americans? The Left yawns

Washington Examiner: Jeff Sessions: Justice Department investigating process used by FBI to apply for FISA warrants

Activist Post: Fox News cuts off reporter when she links psychotropic drugs to Florida shooter

FEE: Foreign meddling won’t undermine tyranny, but this will

National Review: Fire the FBI Chief

Consortium News: Anti-Trumpists use Mueller indictment to escalate tensions with nuclear-armed Russia

I really like this group of socialists: WSWS: Indictment of Russian nationals used to campaign for censorship and war

NR on a roll today: National Review: End 9/11 Syndrome at the FBI

ScienceMag: This Roman ‘gate to hell’ killed its victims with carbon dioxide

The Sooner Politics front page has a picture that declares “There’s 2 kinds of people: 1. Those who love freedom. 2. Those who love power. The 2nd group preys on the 1st. Never elect the 2nd.”

A straight-forward sentiment that most people would agree on in theory.  In practice, we almost always elect the 2nd. Why?  Because the second type is very good at hijacking the message of the 1st.  Indeed, in many ways they’re better at selling a false hope of more freedom than the true freedom-fighters.  These political grifters have an uncanny ability to time their slogans and emotional appeals to the spirit of the moment, and, once swept into office, proceed to enact their authoritarian agenda.

To distinguish the two groups, one must have a fairly solid understanding of the philosophy of liberty, as well as the type of person most likely to defend and advance it, as opposed to an authoritarian opportunist who picks up pro-freedom slogans when it suits his campaign.  The hidden authoritarian will be inconsistent: they’ll tell one group of voters one thing, and another group will get another message. They’ll speak generically, and shy away from any specific policy proposals.

The true pro-liberty candidate will leap into specifics immediately, and will be straightforward with policy proposals.  The hidden authoritarian will hedge his comments and leave a way out for himself if his comments get him into trouble.

Beware vagueness, which, more than any other quality, augurs the future authoritarian.

Ars Technica: Judge shuts door on attempt to get a new trial for Ross Ulbricht

Inverse: How Facebook seemingly knows everything about you

Antiwar.com: Ike’s Military-Industrial-Congressional complex is alive and well

The Intercept: How the UK hacked a European ally and got away with it

Mises: How to kill 300,000 Americans with opioids

New York Times: Russia isn’t the only one meddling in elections.  We do it, too.

Alternet: Humans would rather be in contact with aliens than artificial life created here on Earth, according to study

MintPressNews: The US military will have more robots than humans by 2025

DANIEL LARISON: Maximalist demands won’t change North Korean behavior

Techdirt: The US intel community’s demonization of Huawei remains highly hypocritical

The future’s coming at us fast: Gizmodo: Freaky flea-like robots could one day flip and tumble inside your body

Biometric Update: House subcommittee considers impact of facial recognition bias on gov’t adoption of AI tech

New York Post: Find out if you’re cut out for the CIA at this exhibit

The Skanner: Former FBI director addresses spying on black activists

Daily Beast: FBI admits it failed to investigate tip about school shooter

Vanguard: Facebook threatened with $125m over privacy invasion

WIRED: Inside the mind of Amanda Feilding, countess of psychedelic science

PsyPost: Study reveals similarity between psychedelic states and dreaming

Futurism: Scientists can’t replicate AI studies. That’s bad news.

High Times: The origins of your favorite weed slang

Guardian: Lost Mexican city had as many buildings as Manhattan

In the previous post I mentioned that most of the employees at public schools are women.  It wasn’t meant as a drawback, and I wouldn’t send my young children to schools where the majority of instructors were men.  I meant mainly that they were probably physically less strong than a psychotic male, teenage shooter(they’re pretty much all male).  Despite that, their level-headedness during these situations; locking the door, keeping their class quiet is heroic. Again, assigning private security according the number of students would be a fairly wise step in the right direction.

Now.  The FBI was tipped off about the Florida shooter’s desire to massacre a school a month ago, but “didn’t follow protocols”. Someone close to shooter Cruz apparently detailed to the FBI Cruz’s crazed social media posts and clear desire to shoot up a school, but nothing came of it, and now Florida governor Rick Scott is rightly asking FBI Director Christopher Wray to resign following such a massive screw-up.  And if Wray were decent, he would do it.  But in all probability, he’s not, and he won’t.  Because, after all, the FBI is working overtime to pin a fantastical Russian conspiracy theory on Trump, and doesn’t have time to devote to real situations.  And their lack of attention to true pressing matters has resulting in 17 kids dead at the hands of someone that they could’ve stopped.

BUT. But.  This is all to place an unjustified faith in our government to keep us safe.  And this is clearly an example of how our safety isn’t their priority, which means it’s up to us to keep ourselves and our children safe.  Asking Trump to “do something” is meaningless.  Clamoring for stricter gun control is meaningless.  The problem most of us have is an unjustified faith in ‘other people’ to keep us and our kids safe.  That responsibility falls on us, as is the responsibility to not believe government when it says it will keep us safe.  ‘Gun control’ isn’t what prevents society from devolving into some Mad Max-style dystopia.  Governments do little more than steal from and surveil those that elect them.  Our safety isn’t their priority, so we should stop pretending it is.

Ed: This site gets a flurry of clicks sometime after 8pm, and continues to go up until around 2am.  I appreciate the night owls, as I am one as well.  I’ll continue to post every morning, but I will also begin tailoring/increasing content for the night crowd as well.  Thanks for the views.

The focus right now is, as usual, on the relative ease of access that most adult Americans have to guns, in the wake of the Florida shooting. I’d like to point to two alternative enabling factors that explain these sudden mass shootings on public school campuses:

First, schools are relatively unprotected.  I speak from experience.  A couple of middle-aged ladies in an office can’t guard an almost all-glass door against a madman (why do schools have so many top-to-bottom glass doors?) and protect a school filled with hundreds of kids from kindergarten through fifth grade.  It’s always boggled my mind that we send the most precious people in our lives to institutions filled with unlocked doors and (mostly) women without the means to defend them if necessary.

Secondly, public schools create an artificially toxic environment that tribalizes children.  Force kids into an unnatural social environment, especially junior high and high school, and they begin forming social strata, conformity, and then enforcing that conformity with persistent ridicule and bullying.  The ridiculed and the bullied are forced to endure it 8 hours a day, every day of the week.  It’s really no wonder that suicide rates skyrocket during the school year, and some of the bullied or ostracized snap and shoot up a school.

The solution to the first would be to create safer schools, with private security patrolling the grounds.  The emphasis here is on private security, as opposed to cops.  A private security contractor works for a private company, not the government.  He wouldn’t be unionized, he would have far better and more comprehensive training than a cop, and there would be far more accountability for any misconduct.  There would be none of the silliness about the private contractor being your kid’s ‘friend’ as there is with the police.  He would be there to do one thing: protect the school. He wouldn’t be arresting kids, putting them in handcuffs, or milking them for self-incriminating information.

The solution to the second is trickier, because it strikes at the foundation of the entire public school system.  Middle- and high-schoolers can be unbelievably cruel to each other, especially if they know their tribe is backing them up.  And of course they can bully someone to the point that the individual either kills themselves or kills other students.  These bullies are a threat to everyone, if their behavior pushes someone to the point that they consider an attack.  Public school is the State’s propaganda pipeline to the minds of the young of this country, so it won’t die any time soon, so the only option we have as parents is to pay attention to our children and look for signs of bullied or bullying behavior, and to get them out of that warped environment with their sanity intact while there’s still time.