Digital Authoritarianism: AI Surveillance Signals the Death of Privacy by John W. Whitehead July 21, 2022 “There are no private lives. This a most important aspect of modern life. One of the biggest transformations we have seen in our society is the diminution of the sphere of the private. We must reasonably now all regard the fact that there are no secrets and nothing is private. Everything is public.” ― Philip K. Dick Nothing is private. We teeter on the cusp of a cultural, technological and societal revolution the likes of which have never been seen before. While the political Left and Right continue to make abortion the face of the debate over the right to privacy in America, the government and its corporate partners, aided by rapidly advancing technology, are reshaping the world into one in which there is no privacy at all. Nothing that was once private is protected. We have not even begun to register the fallout from the tsunami bearing down upon us in the form of AI (artificial intelligence) surveillance, and yet it is ...
Border-Control Fallacies by Jacob G. Hornberger July 21, 2022 A writer at Substack named David Ferguson writes: Robert Frost once wrote “good fences make good neighbors.” Very true. Isn’t there any private property on the U.S. side of the border? Doesn’t a property owner have the right to defend his justly obtained property? How about hiring private police to keep intruders from trespassing on your property? The so-called “border crisis” is a massive failure because it does not allow property owners to defend their property.” Alas, Ferguson has it wrong. Private property owners on the U.S. side of the border have the right, both legally and morally, to defend their property from trespassers. I know this from personal experience. I grew up on a farm outside Laredo, Texas, a city on the U.S. Mexico border. Our farm was adjacent to the Rio Grande. Under the law, we had the right to keep trespassers, whether American or Mexican, from entering onto our property without our permission … ...
No Need to Meet With Dictators by Jacob G. Hornberger July 18, 2022 By now, most everyone knows about President Biden’s famous “fist bump” with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi dictator who has been accused of orchestrating the brutal murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi when he visited a Saudi consulate in Turkey. The fist bump took place during Biden’s trip to Saudi Arabia to meet with bin Salman. Biden supporters claim that meeting dictators is sometimes a necessary part of being president. Since Saudi Arabia is one of the world’s largest oil producers — one that could easily become friendly with Russia or China (who are labeled as America’s “adversaries” or “rivals”), they say — it is imperative that Biden travel to Saudi Arabia to play nice with its dictator. In a libertarian world, such unsavory conduct would never happen. It’s only because of the U.S. war machine and interventionism, both foreign and domestic, that U.S. presidents feel ...
The Supreme Court Is Turning America Into a Constitution-Free Zone by John W. Whitehead July 8, 2022 “No one should get used to their rights. Predicting with certainty which ones, if any, will go, or when, is impossible.”—Mary R. Ziegler, legal historian The Supreme Court has spoken: there will be no consequences for cops who brutalize the citizenry and no justice for the victims of police brutality. Although the Court’s 2021-22 rulings ...
Immigration Socialism, the Drug War, and a Police State by Jacob G. Hornberger July 1, 2022 I grew up on a farm a few miles outside Laredo, Texas, which is located on the U.S.-Mexico border. Our farm was situated on the Rio Grande, so we irrigated our fields from water taken from the river. When we would drive down to the river to fix our irrigation pump, we could see Mexico and would oftentimes wave ...
Coming Full Circle with a Renewed Cold War Racket by Jacob G. Hornberger June 30, 2022 With Turkey now removing its objection to Sweden and Finland joining NATO, it is a virtual certainty that the two countries will join this Cold War dinosaur military alliance. In practical terms, that means that the lives of young Americans will now be pledged to come to the automatic defense of Swedes and Finns in the event Russia ...
You Can’t Count on the Police by Jacob G. Hornberger June 23, 2022 At the risk of belaboring the obvious, the police inaction during the mass killing of children in a public school in Uvalde, Texas, provides one more argument against gun control: You just can’t count on the police to keep you safe from a mass killer. Sometimes you have to rely on yourself or on other armed private individuals ...
Musical Chairs in Washington, D.C. by Jacob G. Hornberger June 22, 2022 Republicans are licking their chops over the Federal Reserve’s ostensible plans to raise interest rates aggressively in the months ahead to combat soaring prices. They view a coming big recession as a grand opportunity to win control over Congress in the upcoming November elections. Of course, we have gone through this political musical-chairs nonsense for decades. If ...
An Endless Stream of Scary Official Enemies by Jacob G. Hornberger June 15, 2022 Any government that is a national-security state needs big official enemies — scary ones, ones that will cause the citizenry to continue supporting not only the continued existence of a national-security state form of government but also ever-growing budgets for it and its army of voracious “defense” contractors. That’s, of course, what the current brouhaha about Russia is ...
America, Meet Your New Dictator-in-Chief by John W. Whitehead June 2, 2022 “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have given way to permanent crisis management: to policing the planet and fighting preventative wars of ideological containment, usually on terrain chosen by, and favorable to, our enemies. Limited government and constitutional accountability have been shouldered aside by the kind of imperial presidency our constitutional system was explicitly designed to prevent.” — ...
The Stultification of American Conscience by Jacob G. Hornberger June 1, 2022 One of the fascinating consequences of public (i.e., government) schooling is that it molds the minds of children in such a way that by the time they become adults, their minds inevitably mirror whatever narrative the authorities happen to be advancing at any particular time. In fact, the indoctrination is oftentimes so effective that most of them have no ...
The Centenary of Ludwig von Mises’s Critique of Socialism by Richard M. Ebeling June 1, 2022 At a banquet dinner held in New York City on March 7, 1956, honoring the famous Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, another equally renowned member of the Austrian school of economics, Friedrich A. Hayek, delivered a talk highlighting the important contributions of his long-time mentor and close friend, going back to when they first met in the Vienna of ...
