Tuesday Morning Breakfast For The Brain

The iron fist is beginning to close, can it be stopped before it crushes Americans’ liberty?

Techno-Tyranny: How The US National Security State Is Using Coronavirus To Fulfill An Orwellian Vision

By Whitney Webb/The Last American Vagabond

Last May, a govt org outlined an extremely Orwellian vision for what the US must to do to win “the tech war” against China in AI. It essentially called to remake the entire American economy and society. Now, thanks to Covid19, their vision is taking shape.

Last year, a U.S. government body dedicated to examining how artificial intelligence can “address the national security and defense needs of the United States” discussed in detail the “structural” changes that the American economy and society must undergo in order to ensure a technological advantage over China, according to a recent document acquired through a FOIA request. This document suggests that the U.S. follow China’s lead and even surpass them in many aspects related to AI-driven technologies, particularly their use of mass surveillance. This perspective clearly clashes with the public rhetoric of prominent U.S. government officials and politicians on China, who have labeled the Chinese government’s technology investments and export of its surveillance systems and other technologies as a major “threat” to Americans’ “way of life.”

In addition, many of the steps for the implementation of such a program in the U.S., as laid out in this newly available document, are currently being promoted and implemented as part of the government’s response to the current coronavirus (Covid-19) crisis. This likely due to the fact that many members of this same body have considerable overlap with the taskforces and advisors currently guiding the government’s plans to “re-open the economy” and efforts to use technology to respond to the current crisis.

The FOIA document, obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), was produced by a little-known U.S. government organization called the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI). It was created by the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and its official purpose is “to consider the methods and means necessary to advance the development of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and associated technologies to comprehensively address the national security and defense needs of the United States.”

The NSCAI is a key part of the government’s response to what is often referred to as the coming “fourth industrial revolution,” which has been described as “a revolution characterized by discontinuous technological development in areas like artificial intelligence (AI), big data, fifth-generation telecommunications networking (5G), nanotechnology and biotechnology, robotics, the Internet of Things (IoT), and quantum computing.”

However, their main focus is ensuring that “the United States … maintain a technological advantage in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other associated technologies related to national security and defense.” The vice-chair of NSCAI, Robert Work – former Deputy Secretary of Defense and senior fellow at the hawkish Center for a New American Security (CNAS), described the commission’s purpose as determining “how the U.S. national security apparatus should approach artificial intelligence, including a focus on how the government can work with industry to compete with China’s ‘civil-military fusion’ concept.”

The recently released NSCAI document is a May 2019 presentation entitled “Chinese Tech Landscape Overview.” Throughout the presentation, the NSCAI promotes the overhaul of the U.S. economy and way of life as necessary for allowing the U.S. to ensure it holds a considerable technological advantage over China, as losing this advantage is currently deemed a major “national security” issue by the U.S. national security apparatus. This concern about maintaining a technological advantage can be seen in several other U.S. military documents and think tank reports, several of which have warned that the U.S.’ technological advantage is quickly eroding.

The U.S. government and establishment media outlets often blame alleged Chinese espionage or the Chinese government’s more explicit partnerships with private technology companies in support of their claim that the U.S. is losing this advantage over China. For instance, Chris Darby, the current CEO of the CIA’s In-Q-Tel, who is also on the NSCAI, told CBS News last year that China is the U.S.’ main competitor in terms of technology and that U.S. privacy laws were hampering the U.S.’ capacity to counter China in this regard…

Read the entire article HERE.

Facebook is accused of ‘colluding with state governments to quash free speech’ as it SHUTS DOWN anti-quarantine protest pages

Via The Daily Mail

Facebook says it will consult with state governments on their lockdown orders and will shut down pages planning anti-quarantine protests if the tech giant determines the gatherings violate those rules.

‘Unless government prohibits the event during this time, we allow it to be organized on Facebook. For this same reason, events that defy government’s guidance on social distancing aren’t allowed on Facebook,’ a spokesperson said on the social network’s policy in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.

Facebook officials said they reached out to states individually to understand their lockdown orders then removed posts that violated those rules.

‘We reached out to state officials to understand the scope of their orders, not about removing specific protests on Facebook. We remove the posts when gatherings do not follow the health parameters established by the government and are therefore unlawful,’ a company spokesperson said to DailyMail.com.

The tech firm says it will allow protests that abide by social distancing guidelines to go forth, but will shut down the ones that defy those health orders.

The social network said it has already removed protest messages in California, New Jersey and Nebraska.

The move has led to outrage from Donald Trump Jr and Republican figures like Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, who claim Facebook is violating Americans’ First Amendment rights.

However, many Facebook pages still exist and are planning protests.

On Monday protesters swarmed the state capitol building in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in a rally that was organized on Facebook group ‘Pennsylvanians Against Excessive Quarantine’, as the state claims it never heard from Facebook in regards to its new policy.

Facebook said it’s currently attempting to get information from New York, Wisconsin, Ohio and Pennsylvania on their social distancing guidelines, according to the National Review.

A representative from Pennsylvania’s Department of General Services said to Fox Business that the state has not heard from Facebook in regards to protests.

However, Facebook’s decision to take down protest event posts has been met with severe backlash, with many saying it violates their rights to free speech and expression.

Read the entire article HERE.

Governors: Facebook Contacted Us About Protests, Not Other Way Around

Via Breitbart News

Governors have denied reports that they instructed Facebook to remove pages promoting protests against strict stay-at-home orders, saying that the company reached out to them — not the other way around.

The Nebraska governor’s office told Breitbart News:

The Governor’s Office is not aware of any Facebook events regarding COVID-19 protests, and has not requested Facebook to pull any events down. Facebook reached out last week to learn more about Nebraska’s social distancing restrictions, and the Governor’s staff provided already publicly available information about Nebraska’s ten-person limit and Directed Health Measures.

New Jersey’s governor issued a similar denial: “”The governor’s office did not ask Facebook to remove pages or posts for events promoting lifting the provisions of the governor’s stay-at-home order.”

California Governor Gavin Newsom confirmed in a press conference Monday that the California Highway Patrol had issued a permit for a protest in vehicles that observed “social distancing” requirements. Breitbart News has reached out to Newsom’s office for comment about Facebook’s reported actions.

Earlier Monday, CNN senior media reporter Oliver Darcy reported that Facebook had taken down pages linked to protests against the “quarantine.” He specifically mentioned California, New Jersey, and Nebraska.

Darcy cited CNN reporter Donie O’Sullivan — whose beat is “disinformation, politics, and technology.” O’Sullivan had reported that Facebook had taken down pages promoting protests after “consultation” with state governments:

Politico originally reported: “Facebook shuts down anti-quarantine protests at states’ request.” The article noted: “The world’s largest social network has already removed protest messages in California, New Jersey and Nebraska from its site at the urging of state governments who say those events are prohibited by stay-at-home orders, a [Facebook] spokesperson said” (emphasis added).

A later version of the same Politico article bore the new headline: “Republicans attack Facebook as network shuts down anti-lockdown protests.” The claim that Facebook had acted “at the urging of state governments” had been removed. Instead, Politico reported that a Facebook spokesperson “had been instructed by those state governments that the events are prohibited under the lockdown and social distancing orders that authorities have issued in response to the coronavirus pandemic.”

Breitbart News had reported: “Mark Zuckerberg: Lockdown Protests Are ‘Misinformation,’ Facebook Will Ban Organizers.”

It cited CNN as reporting that state governments had instructed Facebook to remove protest pages, but focused on Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg telling ABC’s Good Morning America that Facebook would shut down the pages as “misinformation.”

Read the entire article HERE.

How the Media Completely Blew the Trump Ventilator Story

Via The National Review

The administration handled the potential shortage deftly.

At a coronavirus-task-force briefing at the beginning of April, White House adviser Jared Kushner explained the approach that would — as events proved — get the country through its ventilator crisis.

He was relentlessly pilloried, mocked, and distorted in the press for it.

After nearly four years of unrelieved Trump hysteria in the media, it’s hard to rank the worst journalistic outrages, but how Kushner’s remarks were misreported and misinterpreted belongs high on the list.

Much of the press coverage and subsequent commentary focused on one sentence at that April 2 briefing: “The notion of the federal stockpile was it’s supposed to be our stockpile. It’s not supposed to be states’ stockpiles that they then use.”

Cue the outrage. As CNBC put it, correctly, in a headline, “Jared Kushner slammed for saying the federal medical supply stockpile isn’t meant for states.”

The blue-checkmarks on Twitter descended in force. Representative Ted Lieu tweeted, “Dear Jared Kushner of the @realDonaldTrump: We are the UNITED STATES of America. The federal stockpile is reserved for all Americans living in our states not just federal employees. Get it?”

Former director of the United States Office of Government Ethics Walter Shaub thundered, “Who the hell does the nepotist think ‘our’ refers to? It is for the American people.”

Partisan outlets piled on. “Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and White House adviser,” Salon wrote, “claimed that the federal stockpile of medical supplies is not for individual states to ‘use,’ even though that is exactly the reason why the stockpile exists.”

And so did mainstream outlets. ABC News rapped Kushner for his “inaccurate description” of the stockpile, which “actually is intended for states’ use.”

In a piece for The New Yorker, Susan Glasser went even further. She wrote that the press briefing “will surely go down as one of the Administration’s most callous performances.” It was symptomatic, she argued, of a federal response that was a “failure by design — not a problem to be fixed but a policy choice by President Trump that either would not or could not be undone.”

All of this was completely ridiculous and wrong. With even a little context, it was obvious what Kushner was saying: States shouldn’t be drawing on the federal stockpile just to hold ventilators in their own reserves while hard-pressed cities were running low.

This was obvious from the very next sentence from Kushner: “So we’re encouraging the states to make sure that they’re assessing the needs, they’re getting the data from their local — local situations and then trying to fill it with the supplies that we’ve given them.”

The proximate reason for Kushner’s comment about the state stockpiles was a dispute between the Trump administration and New York governor Andrew Cuomo. New York City was running out of ventilators. The administration had sent 4,400 but learned that 2,000 of them were being held by the state and hadn’t made their way to the city.

The controversial sentence was part of a long answer setting out the administration’s strategy on ventilators that has, despite all the hue and cry, clearly worked. The emphasis — with Jared Kushner and his team in the middle of it, and capable leadership from Rear Admiral John Polowczyk at FEMA and Admiral Brett Giroir at HHS — was on data and shrewd allocation, so that ventilators did not go to states simply on request.

There’s no doubt that the lockdowns, in bending the curve of cases downward, have played a role in averting any shortage — one of the points of the lockdowns in the first place, of course. But there was no guarantee that we would get to this place where we are today, with ventilators no longer a significant worry.

At the outset, the country was looking at a daunting, perhaps impossible challenge. A chilling briefing at FEMA early on posited that the U.S. could be short 130,000 ventilators by April 1. The federal government had about 16,000 ventilators on hand in its stockpile and several thousand more from the Veteran’s Administration and the Department of Defense.

It was possible the government could perform at the highest level — and still fall short. A couple of insights drove the administration’s effort to get its arms around the problem.

Officials realized, as one White House adviser puts it, that there was “too much guesstimating” going on. New York, for instance, said it needed 40,000 ventilators. Then, the administration interrogated the request. What was that based on? It’s coming from public-health officials. Okay, how are they getting that number? Models. Plus, we don’t want to be short.

It became clear that many governors didn’t know how many ventilators their states had, and they were driven by early models that were “doomsday scenarios,” as one senior administration official puts it. Governors were also acting on the normal impulse to want to be safe, and have more than enough ventilators on hand, just in case. “If you are a governor, which is natural, you are going to over-ask because you want to be over-prepared,” the official explains.

Read the entire article HERE.

Our Goal Must Be A Total Return To Normal

Via The Federalist

Americans must reject a dehumanizing “new normal” in the wake of the Chinese Virus.

Anyone who has ever acted on stage knows the difference between a full audience and a light audience. Even when lights blind the eyes to their presence, even when they are silent, they are there. It’s like the difference between driving a box truck full of furniture or one that is empty and almost weightless. Theater, sports, movies, and church are all driven primarily by an ancient desire to be in each other’s proximity.

President Trump made some waves last week when he rejected the idea that the United States would enter some kind of “new normal” once the Chinese virus has run its course. Asked about the possibility that in this cowardly new world, would social distancing would remain, Trump had this to say:

“Oh, that’s not going to be normal. There’s not going to be a new normal where somebody has been having for 25 years 158 seats in a restaurant and now he’s got 30 or he’s got 60 because that wouldn’t work. That’s not normal. No, normal will be if he has the 158 or 68 seats, and that’s going to happen and it’s going to happen relatively quickly, we hope.”

He went on to proclaim that if Alabama football games had 100,000 fans in attendance before, they will have 100,000 fans in attendance again. It’s the right tone and the right policy. During these almost two months of social purgatory, a kind of fatalism has set in among the right sort. “Of course things can never go back to the way they were,” we are told. Nonsense.

—

The most dangerous people in America today are not the protesters defying social distancing to get their lives back to normal. The most dangerous people are those who say we will never return to normal, and that they have the new rules all picked out for us. No thanks. For many progressives the virus is like climate change on crystal meth, a fast moving emergency that requires the government to seize power from citizens.

There are certainly lessons and opportunities to be gleaned from this bizarre experiment we have all been thrust into. Working from home, new forms of education, tele-medical services, fine, good. But two months ago we were packing bars and ballgames, we were attending baby showers and funerals, spreading germs willy-nilly at EDM shows. All of those things must come back and they will.

If understandable fear is what drove Americans into their homes and succeeded in flattening the curve of the virus in our country, then it is courage that is needed to see our way back to the lives we left behind. The ancient rites bequeathed to us and which we bequeath to our children is a chain that must not be broken. Society cannot long survive social distancing.

Read the entire article HERE.

Michigan Governor: ‘Revolting Against A Tyrannical Government Is Simply Unamerican’

Via The Babylon Bee (Satire)

DETROIT, MI—On Meet the Press Sunday, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer reminded everyone that “revolutions and revolts are simply un-American.”

Whitmer called on the protesters in her state to stop their illegal assembling, reminding them that protesting so-called tyranny is a foreign idea to the history of the United States.

“Protesting and revolting against your wise rulers goes against everything America was built on,” she said. “It flies in the face of every American tradition. Revolting against tyranny has no place in this great country.”

Governor Whitmer then rattled off a long list of things that she also believes to be un-American:

• Declaring independence from tyrants
• Having a list of protected rights
• Separation of powers
• Democratically elected leaders
• Freedom of religion, assembly, the press, protests, and speech.
• Federalism
• Apple pie
• Baseball
• America

“If you’re really Americans, you’ll stop with this dangerous revolutionary activity,” she concluded.

Check out all of the Bee’s takes on politics and society HERE.

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