REPUBLIC REBORN

Reason: If a school cop threatens your 13-year old with child porn charges for sexting, get a lawyer Ed: While it’s probably not wise to give kids smartphones, it’s even less wise to place unaccountable, union-shielded, violence-prone bullies in schools. Better to have trained professionals working with schoolkids rather than someone who couldn’t get a job anywhere else.

FEE: To save rhinos, legalize the horn trade

High Times: California’s history of arresting minorities for marijuana

02/07/18 Overnight Links

Posted on February 6, 2018February 6, 2018 by S. Smith

EFF: Twilio demonstrates why courts should review every National Security Letter

American Thinker: Does James Comey have a perjury problem?

5NewsOnline: Is Facebook listening in on your conversations?

Business Insider: The NYPD spent decades spying on New Yorkers–now you can see what they collected

Cato: Abuse-deterrent opioids and the law of unintended consequences

High Times: Can cannabis wean addicts off heroin and other opiates?

Reason: It’s not enough to get paid for not working, these L.A. police and firefighters figured out how to double it

Activist Post: Law enforcement can use smart meter parking apps to spy on everyone

WhoWhatWhy: What five ‘domestic terrorism’ cases tell us about FBI tactics

Popular Mechanics: Alaska’s melting permafrost is filled with mercury

SingularityHub: ‘Cosmic GPS’ tech will help us explore the furthest reaches of space

No, more police drones will not be a good thing

Posted on February 6, 2018 by S. Smith

With Ford’s patent filed on autonomous, AI-powered police cruisers, some apparently believe the future looks brighter for bias-free policing. The logic goes that, since it’s a robot doing the police work, race and class won’t factor into who gets punished. But it doesn’t take too much of a stretch to see the inevitable future of autonomous cop cars cruising around neighborhoods. For one, the vehicle would most certainly be equipped with advanced facial recognition tech, and instantaneous access to a biometric database that it would also feed information into. Second, these drone vehicles wouldn’t replace cops at all, but merely be used as another weapon by them against us. In essence, each community would be given it’s own personal Surveillance State avatar, an automated, AI-powered snitch snooping around neighborhoods, gulping up images of people, their activities, etc.

Like I’ve said before, not just the protection of our liberty, but our continued existence as a species depends on the preservation of a sphere of privacy from our own government. The unrelenting push towards total surveillance is a push toward a point when we no longer have that ability.

02/06/18 Morning links

Posted on February 6, 2018 by S. Smith

New York Times: NYT asks court to unseal documents on surveillance of Carter Page

Reason: Trump defenders should support the NYT effort to unseal secret surveillance documents

Alternet: The FBI targeted the Left with devious tactics for years–now they’re finally receiving the same treatment in return

The Federalist: How senior-level corruption can affect entire agencies like the FBI

Also The Federalist: If you love law enforcement, you must criticize FBI corruption

Here comes the perversion of bodycams: SCMP: Chinese police testing panoramic-view body cameras with inbuilt facial recognition

The Intercept: Iranian-American refused to spy for the FBI and wound up with a prison sentence

The Guardian: EU data protection law may end up protecting scammers, experts warn

CNBC: Bitcoin plunges below $6,000

FEE: The solar panel tariff threatens far more American jobs than it protects

Aeon: “Entangled time” is mind-boggling

02/06/18 Overnight links

Posted on February 6, 2018 by S. Smith

CNBC: Audit finds Pentagon lost track of $800 million in projects

The Hill: Will FISA secrecy doom democracy?

Reason: Governments hate bitcoin and cash for the same reason: They protect people’s privacy.

Al Jazeera: Is Mexico the most dangerous country on Earth?

FFF: America: A military nation

MintPressNews: Cops rebranded as “school resource officers” can injure and ciminalize schoolkids

CNNMoney: Fasten your seatbelt, Dow futures tumble over 400 points

High Times: Girl Scout sells over 300 boxes of cookies outside marijuana dispensary

Liberty also means being free to cleanse our doors of perception on occasion

Posted on February 5, 2018 by S. Smith

There was a period of time when I felt compelled to consume every idea, every piece of music, art, literature, and poetry possible. This led me down many paths, which all seemed to converge on my finding the philosophy of liberty. My massive, strange book collection is a testament to that time of my life, and the knowledge gained pops up in convenient places when I need context for a current event. I came across Romantic-era poet William Blake as a teenager, but read him more deeply in my early twenties, specifically his book The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. There’s something hypnotic about his use of language, but the dualism between what Blake saw as two types of people: the energetic creators and rational organizers stuck with me. I won’t go any further into this aspect at the moment. What’s significant to me about Blake’s book is this passage:

“As I was walking among the fires of hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius; which to Angels look like torment and insanity, I collected some of their Proverbs; thinking that as the sayings used in a nation, mark its character, so the Proverbs of Hell, shew the nature in Infernal wisdom better than any description of buildings or garments,

When I came home: on the abyss of the five senses, where a flat sided steep frowns over the present world, I saw a mighty Devil folded in black clouds, hovering on the sides of the rock, with cor

roding fires he wrote the following sentence now percieved by the minds of men, & read by them on earth.

How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way,

Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?”

Most people, especially a particularly pretentious type who’ve probably never actually read Blake, know the poet from this quote:

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”

Both passages are from the same book, but the second is the source from which Aldous Huxley took the title for the published account of his experiment with the psychedelic alkaloid, mescaline, The Doors of Perception. And of course The Doors took their name from Huxley’s book. Huxley reported an immersive spiritual experience while under the influence and felt that there are regions of the mind that could probably only be accessed with the help of psychedelics.

Now, mescaline is the active chemical in peyote, a substance found in a small cactus, and used by Native North Americans for over 5,000 years in spiritual rituals. Most observations from those who have had experience with the psychedelic concur that it induces a spiritual, or transcendent state of mind unlike anything they’ve experienced before.

This is similar to experiences with other psychedelics, such as magic mushrooms, DMT, ketamine, ecstasy, and LSD. These compounds have been found to have almost no risk of use, particularly mescaline, psilocybin or ‘psychedelic mushrooms’, and MDMA/ecstasy, and DMT. There is also incontrovertible proof that these compounds effectively treat depression, post-traumatic stress syndrome, and a wide variety of mental disorders. And yet they remain illegal. I should note that the world is slowly waking up to their potential. In their place, however, are pharmaceutical monstrosities that are ubiquitously prescribed despite their known, devastating, side effects, and low effectiveness.

I’m of the opinion that if psychedelics were to become ‘mainstream’, where every adult had quick access to these substances, the world experience an unheard-of medical revolution. The pharmaceutical industry would collapse, having been built upon patented petri dish poisons, and truly healing medicine would be available at almost no cost to everyone.

This also brings me back to Blake’s dualism. The future of the human race depends on rare, creative individuals who theorize, create, and invent, whose originality solves the problems of the world. I believe that many of these people need psychedelics to aid the creative process. I also believe that the lack of access to these substances is why we see so many creative individuals turn to alcohol or other dangerous substances and lifestyles. Their mind is craving something that they can’t yet provide.

We now see Silicon Valley entrepreneurs experiment with LSD ‘micro-dosing’ to enhance creativity.

It’s also now reported that the ingestion of psychedelic mushrooms can lead to anti-authoritarian behavior.

I believe this kind of experimentation with psychedelics should be available to everyone, not only because of the priceless medicinal value, but because our future as a species probably depends on allowing the ‘energetic creators’ the freedom to experiment with these substances.

Please send your random responses to my random posts to digitalsunset86@gmail.com

02/05/18 Morning links

Posted on February 5, 2018February 5, 2018 by S. Smith

Washington Examiner: California overreacts and presumes every homeschooling parent is a child abuser

Consortium News: ‘Deep State’ veterans find new homes in mainstream media

The Week: China’s Black Mirror moment Ed: The Chinese gov’t will start giving their citizens a “social credit” score, which measures each Chinese citizen’s “trustworthiness”. Disturbing because this is our future as well.

Washington Post: Hawaii false missile threat: Fired worker says he feels bad but is not at fault

FEE: Imagine being locked up in prison because of bad forensics

BankInfoSecurity: Fitness Dystopia in the Age of Self-Surveillance

High Times: This Congressman could be sabotaging legal cannabis

Al Jazeera: Saudi-led coalition killed 68 children in Yemen: UN. Ed: Let us never again believe the ‘preemptive war for humanitarian reasons’ lie. The destruction of Yemen and its population by the US-armed Saudi military should never be forgotten, as this is clearly one of the greatest war crimes ever committed by our own government. That only independent news is discussing this at any length is a mind-boggling scandal.

ACLU: Congress needs to hold ICE accountable for abuses

Reason: The pernicious myth of “Chain Migration” Ed: The illegal immigrant scare has been more psychological propaganda used to construct a proto-totalitarian Surveillance State along the US border. It’s no exaggeration at all to say that the security of our rights and privacy along the border is a good indicator for the security of our rights and privacy will be in the rest of the country within the next two decades. In the same way that foreign theaters of war are zones where the Pentagon can test all manner of new weapons and tech, the US border provides a testing arena for total surveillance. It also provides feedback for the ‘tyranny threshold’ that Americans currently are conditioned to accept. Chances are, if Americans are accepting subhuman treatment at the border, they’ll accept it everywhere else, too.

Newsweek: China building AI-powered nuclear submarine that ‘could have its own thoughts’

CNBC: Over $60 billion wiped off value of cryptocurrencies as bitcoin drops below $8,000

Futurism: Florida man becomes first person to live with advanced mind-controlled robotic arm