REPUBLIC REBORN

Is there anything more terrifying than a dumb person with a gun?  Well, there are, but an armed dumb person is bad, and if they’ve got a badge pinned to their chest, they have the potential to become a living nightmare.  This situation, however, is the norm within the nation’s police departments, who’s officers have a mean IQ score of 104.  That’s not all that low, and not exactly “dumb”,with the mean IQ score for US citizens being 98, but a court ruling from 2000 casts a shadow over the correlation between IQ and employment opportunities within law enforcement.  Basically, the court ruled that the police can refuse to hire someone based on an IQ that is too high. Robert Jordan applied for a job as an officer but was rejected based an IQ score of 125 which was deemed too high.  The court ruled that the department had a right to discriminate based on IQ because it could possibly result in lower turn-over.  Theoretically, smarter people would get bored with police work and quit.  Seems like any company could then discriminate based on IQ, which I believe is within their right, but I also believe something else is at play here.

Smarter people are less likely to be overtaken by emotion, less likely to follow an order that could lead to harm of someone.  It would be interesting to see the IQ score of the SWAT cop who recently murdered a young father-of-two who did nothing more than answer the door, or Philip Brailsford, the Arizona cop who murdered a prone and sobbing Daniel Shaver, also a young father-of-two.  It should be noted that Shaver’s 8-year old daughter said she “wanted to die” so she could be with her daddy.

Brailsford clearly looks like a dim bulb, and has a history of unnecessarily injecting violence into situations.  But it would be interesting to see the results of an IQ test.  I imagine he’s on the left side of the bell curve.

I write this also because of my interactions with police.  While cordial, they are clearly very emotional people.  I don’t believe its the nature of their job, which is safer than most, but rather the screening process.

Could higher intelligence standards, more comprehensive IQ tests, lead to fewer deaths at the hands of American cops?  I have a feeling it could.

Heavily taxing and regulating a plant that anyone can easily grow in their homes doesn’t really sound like wise public policy.  But California is currently attempting it, and I suspect the situation is going to end in only one way: a massive black market in homegrown, untaxed marijuana.  Which means California will actually lose out on millions in revenue.  But while California’s rate is $9.25 per ounce, Washington taxes its weed at a mindboggling $50 per ounce.  How is that really any different from straight-up prohibition?  Cartels, or the elderly couple down the street, will step in and provide tax-free weed, and make a fortune.

This provides a pretty good example of the nature of economics, which is truly is nothing more than refined, and consistently applied, common sense, as Joseph Schumpeter explained to the world.  If it can be easily grown in your home, why not just do that rather than buy an expensive product from a third party? This isn’t the cure for baldness, or cancer, or the iPhone they’re trying to tax at this rate.  It’s a small plant that anyone can grow, anywhere.  Policy makers should ruminate on that for at least a moment before they wave the tax wand.

Ed: It’s my belief that marijuana should be legalized completely, with no tax rate other than the usual sales tax that we pay for everything else.  The only regulation being a prohibition on selling it to kids.  Why not just allow a multi-billion dollar industry to spring up, flourish unrestrained, and create millions of high-paying jobs?  It’s a plant that anyone can grow.  How are you going to regulate and tax that?  Just step back and let the market do its magic.

Don’t be alarmed. I’m currently experimenting with the layout of the site, but the content will always be the same.  If you have suggestions/comments/gripes, send them to digitalsunset86@gmail.com.

Thanks for the page views and welcome to all the new readers.  This site is basically a stripped-down news aggregation site from the point of view of someone deeply affected by the ideas of liberty as espoused by Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Albert Jay Nock, etc.  The point of view, also, from someone involved with the ‘Ron Paul Revolution’ and who holds a desire to complete that peaceful, philosophical revolution in our lifetimes.  It was a true revolution for liberty, the most radical political movement this country has ever seen.  So, there will be news aggregation, but also short commentary, important quotes, important essays, important research.  I will post what I deem “important” from my ‘libertarian’ political perspective, which is nothing more complicated than a desire to see voluntary interaction between consenting adults expanded into as many areas of life as possible.  I’ve written regularly for several publications before, but now, my writing will appear exclusively at Republic Reborn.  I picked this name for this blog because I feel it conveys the attitude, and goal, of Paul’s revolution.  A resurgence of liberty, a dying republic, reborn on the ideals that it was originally founded upon.

In other news, the home of the majority of my writing over the past three years, Red Dirt Report, will be shuttered by its editor in one month.  Here is a link to my articles from there, read them while you can.

Also, the number of page views I wake up to has become alarmingly high, which means I will shortly get my act together and get you early-birds more content. Never fear, and thanks for reading.

Techdirt: Revealed: Vietnam’s 10,000-strong internet monitoring force, tasked with stamping out wrongful views

Law&Liberty: Standing up for free speech on campus

FEE: How an illegal shipping container reshaped the world economy.

Antiwar.com: JUSTIN RAIMONDO: Everybody’s wrong about the Iranian rebellion

More: Activist Post: Something stinks about the Iranian protests, Iran suspicious of demonstration’s roots

Zero Hedge: Anatomy of a crypto-nightmare: Ripple CEO now richer than Zuckerberg

CNBC: North Korea accidentally hit one of its own cities with a ballistic missile last year

Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble: CNBC: Dow breaks above 25,000 for first time ever after strong jobs data

The Federalist: Can the Trump deregulatory boom save the GOP in 2018?

TheNextWeb: This live-stream of an AI learning to play Super Mario is awesome

So sad: Deep Sea News: How we know the Megalodon doesn’t still exist

KIRO-TV: Washington State sues Motel 6 for sharing guest lists with immigration enforcement

ACLU: New documents underscore problems of ‘social media vetting’ of immigrants

FPRI: The FISA section 702 saga: With 702 expired, where do things go from here?

Techdirt: Facebook allowing Israel security forces to shape the news that Palestinians see

ABC Online: Should we be worried about facial recognition?

SecurityInfoWatch: 15 years later, READ ID Act’s vision will finally become reality

iTnews: China to build AI research park

Front lines of the CRISPR revolution: First steps toward CRISPR cure of Lou Gehrig’s disease

Yessssss: CRISPR-editing in cacao plants could save it from extinction

High Times: Did a CNN anchor smoke pot on live TV on New Year’s Eve?

Reason: The War on Terror is a war on Minnesota’s peaceful, entrepreneurial Somali immigrants

The terminator has been dethroned as sci-fi’s most terrifying killer robot.  That honor now, and probably forever, belongs to the headless, robotic, murder dogs from Black Mirror’s episode ‘Metalhead’.  Set sometime in the future, with pretty much no details given on how the world ended up in such a state, except for the fact that a pack of almost invincible, quadrupedal drones stalk the land, murdering as if on auto-pilot, forever carrying out some outmoded directive of a long-ago ended war.

But seriously, watching one of these headless robot dogs break out into full, high-speed lope as it chases a fleeing van is unsettling on some primal level.  Maybe it’s the lack of a face, or the fact that it clearly has only one goal in mind: murder anyone it comes into contact with, as quickly and efficiently as possible.  I won’t spoil the rest, but it’s the best episode of the new season.

It’s unsettling in a different way as well, in that this future is entirely within the realm of possibility.  It’s not that far-fetched a notion that the military would create an army of almost invincible dog drones, equipped with weapons and one task.  Imagine if Google’s Go-mastering AI were uploaded to each drone as well?  How would any military stop a drone army that could learn and adapt in order to carry out its assigned task?

The robot apocalypse doesn’t require a fully self-aware AI, but maybe just a military drone that we built a little too well.

Global Research: Draconian State Surveillance: Britain’s falling press freedom tells of another disturbing story

The Hill: Bulk surveillance is the wrong way to approach security

National Defense: Big Data, artificial intelligence to advance modeling and simulation

Bloomberg: Americans should have more control over their data

Techdirt: Texas cops arrest journalist for publishing confidential info given to her by a cop

Patch: Will ABC really tell us what happened at Waco in 1993?

Washington Times: The Bundy cases bear remarkable, and unsettling, similarities to 1993 Waco standoff

American Conservative: Washington’s gutless reaction to our addiction crisis

FEE: The Postal Service is the problem, not Amazon

Ars Technica: Meet “raw” water: ludicrously-priced unfiltered water with random bacteria

Wired: Why artificial intelligence is not like your brain…yet

USA Today: Elon Musk says AI could doom civilization.  Zuckerberg disagrees.  Who’s right?

FEE: Insane Homeland Security spending doesn’t make us any safer

The New American: DHS to spend $1 billion to expand illegal facial scanning program at airports

And for a comprehensive look into the expansion of facial recognition tech in US airports, Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology recently released a detailed report, Not Ready for Takeoff

Axios: Surveillance and sex-trafficking on Congress’ to-do list

Reason: RAND PAUL: No foreign spy program reauthorization without citizen protections

Techdirt: Police training firm dumps interrogation technique linked to multiple false confessions

Defense Daily Network: Pentagon begins year of restructure with uncertain funding

Slate: 2017 was a great year for alien-hunting

The National Interest: Who watches the watchers in the US navy?

Futurism: An AI-powered network could save the navy billions of dollars

Cipher Brief: Pandora’s Bot: how cyber weapons can wreak havoc

Techdirt: DHS documents show harassment and intrusive device searches are a common occurrence at US borders

National Herald India: Will 2018 be the year of Aadhaar-linked deaths?

Planet Biometrics: Ukraine starts collecting biometric data at the border

The Register: UK security chief: how about a tax for tech firms that are ‘uncooperative’ on terror content?

WESA: Pittsburg readies expansion of camera, gunshot surveillance city-wide.  Coming to your city, unless you stop it

IB Times UK: NSA leaker Edward Snowden speaks out as Iran silences dissent on the internet

Silicon UK: China’s WeChat denies storing users’ data after spying claims

STAT: The statistics can’t capture the opioid epidemic’s impact on children

Gizmodo: In 2018, we will CRISPR human beings

RT: Bitcoin billionaires and privacy crusaders: Tech leaders to watch in 2018

Coindesk: Aim, fire: bulletproofs is a breakthrough for privacy on the blockchain

InterAksyon: Silicon Valley keeps trends as artificial intelligence goes mainstream

Antiwar.com: Iranian protesters raise stakes, attack police stations

Huffington Post: The ‘Merchants of Death’ survive and prosper.  First-World global weapons dealers to Third World tyrants now call themselves ‘defense contractors’.

The Hill: A year later, an investigation in search of a crime

Well this hits close to home: New York Post: Why poop toys for kids are flying off the shelf.  Ed: Parents know why their kids love this stuff, and why we buy them: they’re hilarious, and watching a kid’s raw, feral delight at these toys is too good not to buy.  Basically, no other toy elicits a reaction anywhere near the level that these do.

More from New York Post: The 5 craziest things we learned about the universe in 2017

I now support GMOs FirstPost: No more chocolate by 2050? Scientists say fragile cocoa plant likely to be victim of global warming

LA Times: Trump’s border wall through the eyes of an architecture critic

Counterpunch: Guantanamo remains a global symbol of injustice

One thing I’ve never understood about the Left is the fairly obvious cognitive dissonance between their desire for greater, or even total, government intervention into the economy on the one hand, and their desire to end police brutality on the other.  As 2017 comes to an end, initial numbers of “officer-involved shootings” for the year come out at 976, according WaPo’s database. This is slightly more than the 963 killed in 2016, which means that pretty much all the activism from the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as other civil liberties organizations focused on the subject, has had pretty much no effect whatsoever on policy.  This number doesn’t include the number of arrests, beatings, taserings, and general day-to-day harassment of American citizens by cops. Which probably runs into the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of such negative interactions.  What policy is responsible for these interactions even existing? Simply, the War on Drugs.  Now, the War on Drugs is an intrusive, tyrannical government program of prohibition, which criminalizes voluntary behavior, creating an entire class of “criminals”.  Strangely, every single person who considers themselves a part of the ‘Left’ opposes the Drug War, and wishes to see it abolished.  I wonder what they think they’re silently supporting by opposing drug prohibition?  Freedom to choose what we ingest.  Yet they are still in favor of government control of the economy, of a top-down redistribution of “wealth”, a strict control of economic activity, ostensibly to eliminate “inequality”.  But they see the Drug War.  They see how just one single policy can employ hundreds of thousands of cops, how it can provide the justification for a militarization of said cops, and how it directly leads to the incarceration of hundreds of thousands, the ruination of the lives and livelihoods of families, of entire generations.

Just one single policy in the United States is almost solely responsible for the rise of the Police State here.  The prohibition of just a few substances has lead to this.  Now, the Left essentially desires prohibition to extend to as many areas of life as possible.  And, to jump straight to the point, there is no other way to accomplish this than to employ an army of cops to enforce it.  Restriction of voluntary activity requires police states of varying scale, depending on how much activity you wish to restrict.  And ponder a moment the types of people who will be filling the occupation of “police officer” in an environment of prohibition.  As the list of prohibited activities increases, it will be necessary to enforce it.  Hiring more cops as quickly as possible means lowering the standards for applicants.  (Just look at the Border Patrol, or the TSA, both of which routinely hires thugs of every stripe.  Airline passengers are kept any safer, but their belongings are stolen by agents at a rate of 200 thefts per day.  From 2010 to 2014, TSA agents stole $2.5 million worth of belongings from checked luggage.  The Border Patrol, on the other hand, appear to hire on personalities that delight in dragging the innocent out of their car, giving them a body cavity search on the roadside

Thugs, criminals, physically violent, and really anyone not burdened with an overabundance of brains gets to be a cop in a Police State.  But a Police State is only necessary when a government needs to enforce the prohibition of previously legal voluntary behavior.

I write this because I’ve recently had extended conversations with several people who openly desire an implementation of socialist policy of one stripe or another.  Their reasoning rests on the very real inequalities that arise from a free market.  Some people make far more money than others, people stratified by income do treat each other differently, and it generates resentment.  But these genuine socialists oppose the Drug War because of the very consequences listed earlier.  I don’t press them too much on their beliefs, I prefer to listen to their reasoning.  What they don’t appear to do too much is compare socialist economies in reality to the predominantly market-based economy of the United States.  All socialist experiments have descended into police states that systematically starved and murdered their citizens.  While countries that have allowed even a slight amount of market activity has at least not starved.  What is wrong with market economies are the vestiges of prohibition and regulation that haven’t yet been swept away, not the market itself.

What I don’t really get is the obsessive focus on “inequality” in a market economy to the exclusion of everything else.  Should everything be sacrificed at the hands of a totalitarian government for the off chance that we’ll become more equal?  The ability to shop for fresh groceries in the dead of winter, or sitting in a cafe drinking hot tea while using Wi Fi on a $200 laptop that holds a charge for 11 hours, is a miracle that no one else in the history of the human race has experienced.

To conclude, the argument for liberty is far more broad than just an absence of a Police State.  But the point here is that support for a government that can prohibit every activity will create a massive police force to do just that.  Socialism will be enforced by the low-IQ thug who previously could not find employment elsewhere.  He, along with a legion of his now-deputized ilk, will be beat, kill, kidnap and harass because that is what’s required to enforce the socialist ideal.  The people will wait in breadlines, eat their pets, eat the local zoo wildlife, and eventually starve.  Society will rip itself apart, in the same way that Venezuela is today.

This concludes an extended rant on something I’ve noticed about supporters of socialism recently.  To counter, offer comments, heckle me, etc., you can contact this writer at digitalsunset86@gmail.com, until I can get the comments’ section set up.