Friday Morning Breakfast For The Brain

THANK GOD IT’S FRIDAY!!

Family-owned grocery store smeared by Oberlin College just got $33 million in punitive damages

Via The College Fix

On Thursday afternoon, an Ohio jury ordered Oberlin College to pay $33 million more in punitive damages to a family-owned grocery store near campus, adding to the $11.2 million in compensatory damages it awarded the store last week.

The $33 million punitive award is above the maximum allowable amount the jury could award by Ohio law, which is $22 million, so it will likely be reduced. Yet the ruling shows the jury did not buy the sob story the college had put forth that it was running short on cash and such an award would harm students. It is also evidence the jury did not believe assertions made by the school’s attorneys that Oberlin had made procedural changes in response to the episode.

In ruling against Oberlin, the jury determined campus leaders had participated in a racially motivated smear attempt against nearby Gibson’s Bakery, a small 130-year-old grocery that had done business with the school for decades.

Ordering Oberlin to pay the full penalty strikes a blow on behalf of businesses and other campus members who are constantly being threatened with personal and financial ruin by overzealous campus activists. It is also a sign that Oberlin administrators never acknowledged what they had done wrong — instead pushing responsibility for their actions to student protesters.

Read the entire article HERE.

Exclusive: Facebook’s Process to Label You a ‘Hate Agent’ Revealed

Via Breitbart News

China Social Credit Score Comes to USA

Facebook monitors the offline behavior of its users to determine if they should be categorized as a “Hate Agent,” according to a document provided exclusively to Breitbart News by a source within the social media giant.
The document, titled “Hate Agent Policy Review” outlines a series of “signals” that Facebook uses to determine if someone ought to be categorized as a “hate agent” and banned from the platform.

Those signals include a wide range of on- and off-platform behavior. If you praise the wrong individual, interview them, or appear at events alongside them, Facebook may categorize you as a “hate agent.”

Facebook may also categorize you as a hate agent if you self-identify with or advocate for a “Designated Hateful Ideology,” if you associate with a “Designated Hate Entity” (one of the examples cited by Facebook as a “hate entity” includes Islam critic Tommy Robinson), or if you have “tattoos of hate symbols or hate slogans.” (The document cites no examples of these, but the media and “anti-racism” advocacy groups increasingly label innocuous items as “hate symbols,” including a cartoon frog and the “OK” hand sign.)

Facebook will also categorize you as a hate agent for possession of “hate paraphernalia,” although the document provides no examples of what falls into this category.

The document also says Facebook will categorize you as a hate agent for “statements made in private but later made public.” Of course, Facebook holds vast amounts of information on what you say in public and in private — and as we saw with the Daily Beast doxing story, the platform will publicize private information on their users to assist the media in hitjobs on regular American citizens.

Read the entire article HERE.

Just When You Thought Surveillance Tech Couldn’t Get Any More Orwellian…

Via Zero Hedge

Surveillance systems are insidious and are finding their way into our homes.
In case you’re one of those ‘careful’ types who wouldn’t allow that kind of nonsense in your home, Huawei and other very large manufacturers of electronics in China and around the world have become big suppliers to China’s security services. All they need to do is develop surveillance systems that help improve our lives at the same time so we actually pay for the privilege. Systems such as Ulo not only watch your home for you, it becomes part of your family. Can you think of other surveillance systems that we’ve now graciously invited into our homes?

What has begun is the dismantling of due process and the systematic expansion of systems that can be mined for data. Not only is every action observed, anything that the program decides is aberrant or not beneficial can now be punished without any intervention or legal protection – and no one is safe.

Now, most likely, you are reading this from a country outside of China, so why do you care? The AI in the fictional TV show based in the U.S., Person of Interest couldn’t ever become a reality, could it? Systems in the U.S. have been able to automatically scan license plates for a while now and alert police to stolen vehicles. Cameras are now on pretty much every intersection in any city in the country and along the highways. The infrastructure to start this kind of surveillance state is already in place. All it would take is to somehow tap into this system with an AI to observe human behavior and perhaps even judge and jury like what’s happening in China. Unfortunately, this is also becoming a reality.

Read the entire article HERE.

‘Strengthen’ America: NBC Pushes Liberal Dream to Abolish Electoral College

Via Newsbusters

As NBC Nightly News continued its monotonous drumbeat on Thursday to elevate liberal policy positions ahead of the Democratic debate they were holding, the network gave the megaphone to South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg in order to push for abolishing the Electoral College.

Correspondent Harry Smith let Buttigieg freely suggest the country had to “strengthen American democracy” because we were supposedly in an era of deteriorating voting rights. In reality, his “Big Idea” would damage the framework our founders put in place to protect the people from tyranny.

“America over time has grown more democratic and I think that’s a good thing, but it’s not a one-way street. Sometimes we’ve taken steps backwards,” the candidate opined. “And I’m afraid we’re living through one of those periods. It’s becoming harder to vote and harder to make sure that your vote counts.”

Again playing campaign spokesperson for a Democrat, Smith made the pitch for the solution for the candidate. “Buttigieg wants same-day voter registration nationwide, wants to grant statehood to Puerto Rico and Washington D.C., and he says the electoral college has outlived usefulness.” Of course, there was no mention that D.C. was supposed to just be a federal district for federal use and not a state, and was undoubtedly a Democratic stronghold.

“Twice in my young lifetime, I’ve seen the American people overruled by the electoral college. It’s time for that to go because it’s undemocratic,” Buttigieg decried.

Read the entire article HERE.

Trans Activists: We’re Normal, But You Must Pay To Fix Us

Via The Federalist

One of the first major successes of the “gay liberation” movement in the United States was the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA’s) 1973 decision to remove homosexuality from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the “DSM”). Early activists in the movement knew they would never persuade the public that they were normal as long as doctors said they were sick. The fact that the decision was more political than scientific complicates the history, but the goal was clear.

Like homosexuals, transgender activists have long been offended at the idea that trans people have a “disorder.” As a recent online article puts it, they believe “experiencing gender as different from the one assigned at birth is not a disorder or a disease – but rather a natural variation of human experience.”

Addressing that issue is more complicated for transgender activists than it was for homosexual ones, though. Homosexuals felt no “treatment” for their identity was necessary. However, those who identify as transgender often seek cross-sex hormones and gender reassignment surgery, to alter their bodies to more closely resemble those of the preferred sex.

They could pay for such procedures themselves, but that’s expensive. So to justify forcing third parties (insurance companies or taxpayers) to pay for these procedures, they need a diagnostic code from the DSM.

Read the entire article HERE.

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