Author: nick

This graphic from Stockholm Resilience Institute depicts how humanity has breached 7 of 9 planetary boundaries that provide it a safe operating space. Most recently, the ocean acidification boundary was crossed. This demonstrates our failure to recognize the common good, the element which links the crises now facing us. The world is confronted by a boggling array of crises, testing the limits of human comprehension, let alone hope. In the immediate moment, a crisis of global supply chains caused by the shutdown of the Hormuz Strait threatens not only the greatest energy shock in history – It also imperils food…

I WANT FREE MINDS AND FREE MARKETS! Help Reason push back with more of the fact-based reporting we do best. Your support means more reporters, more investigations, and more coverage. Make a donation today! No thanks I WANT TO FUND FREE MINDS AND FREE MARKETS Every dollar I give helps to fund more journalists, more videos, and more amazing stories that celebrate liberty. Yes! I want to put my money where your mouth is! Not interested SUPPORT HONEST JOURNALISM So much of the media tries telling you what to think. Support journalism that helps you to think for yourself. I’ll…

In one of the scariest moments in modern history, we’re doing our best at ScheerPost to pierce the fog of lies that conceal it but we need some help to pay our writers and staff. Please consider a tax-deductible donation. Michelle Ellner When the lights go out in Havana, the foreign cameras arrive to film the darkness. They come for the blackout glow: candles in apartment windows, families sleeping on balconies, mothers fanning infants through another airless night. They come for the line outside the pharmacy, the bus that never comes, the refrigerator gone warm. They come for the…

Yesterday evening, the UK’s High Court ruled in favour of the Metropolitan Police in a legal challenge pertaining to the use of Live Facial Recognition Technology (LFR) across London’s transport network. The case had been brought by Silkie Carlo of Big Brother Watch and Shaun Thompson, a youth worker who was previously misidentified by the technology, “over concerns it could be used arbitrarily or in a discriminatory way”. Specifically, their lawyers argued that the current powers claimed by police governing the use of LFR would breach articles 8, 10 & 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), But the…

“If these machines are not conscious, what more could it possibly take to convince you that they are?” That’s the question that esteemed scientist and outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins asks in a new column at UnHerd , after becoming convinced that his AI chatbot (Anthropic’s “Claude”) is having genuine conversations with him. Dawkins is hardly alone in this view – many users of AI chatbots come to this conclusion, after having what appear to be long, intelligent back-and-forths with their chatbot of choice. But it still staggering to see someone of Dawkins’ intellectual standing not just saying “it sure does…

“Hate speech” is notoriously hard to define and is usually a subjective characterization of harsh words. Though the term is thrown around by people describing comments they don’t like, it generally refers to expression that might not be nice but is protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution as well as state speech protections. But that’s not going to stop California lawmakers from trying to hector people into refraining from voicing nasty sentiments. You are reading The Rattler from J.D. Tuccille and Reason. Get more of J.D.’s commentary on government overreach and threats to everyday liberty. Existing…

Oneida Lake at Sunset. Photograph Source: John Brighenti – CC BY 2.0 “You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them.  You can crush them by ignoring them.  By refusing to think, refusing to change.  And that’s precisely what our society is doing! …The unadmitted, inadmissable government …rules the… society by stifling the individual mind.”  [Contradicting Shevek who calls him“crazy,” Bedap continues] No, brother, I’m sane.  What drives people crazy is trying to live outside reality….The reality is pain…But it’s the lies, evasions of reality that drive you crazy…  –Bedap, reproving Shevek, in The Dispossessed by Ursula K.LeGuin “A scientist can pretend that his work isn’t himself, it’s merely…

As Mark Twain wrote, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Lately, I’ve been hearing a recurring rhythm—and getting the blues—as the legislature is about to repeat a grievous mistake. The issue involves public-employee pensions, as the legislature has advanced two bills that would exacerbate the state’s pension problems in much the way it did 27 years ago. First the requisite history lesson. In 1999, the Legislature passed Senate Bill 400. The stock market was booming, and the nation’s largest pension fund, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, was awash in cash. “Investment earnings had averaged 13.5 percent for…

DHS funded. Congress has passed a spending bill that ends the monthslong shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). On Thursday, the House approved a bill that funds the department—except for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection. The Reason Roundup Newsletter by Liz Wolfe Liz and Reason help you make sense of the day’s news every morning. The 76-day shutdown began in February, when Democrats refused to fully fund the department after immigration officers fatally shot two U.S. citizens in Minnesota. Before they would send the agency money, the no voters wanted reforms, including requirements that immigration…

Image by Klemen Kuster. I’m currently working from the roof of the Austin Public Library, or at least I was working until I got distracted and started writing this instead. And before you picture me sitting cross-legged in gravel between a fire escape and an HVAC unit, I should clarify that our library has an actual rooftop garden—complete with tables and chairs and native plants, shaded by a solar panel arbor—which I have to assume is not standard for libraries across the country. From six floors above street level, I watch the traffic move up and down Cesar Chavez, and…