Friday Morning Breakfast For The Brain

Think that you live in a democracy? Better take a good look around.

Sleepy Campaign Strategy Mystery Solved

Via American Greatness

Biden didn’t really campaign because he—or at least his handlers—knew the fix was in.

One of the great mysteries surrounding the presidential election of 2020 has now been solved. For months, people on both sides of the aisle noted the huge discrepancy between the campaign styles of Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Trump was a dynamo, sitting for interviews, holding press conferences, participating in an ever-increasing series of rallies across the country.

Joe Biden, by contrast, rarely left his basement and when he did it was to address 10 or 15 carefully screened supporters or pundits who were coached about what they could say. Even Biden’s supporters, the innocent ones, marked the difference and were concerned. How could their candidate win when he basically refused to campaign?

We now know the answer.

Biden didn’t really campaign because he—or at least his handlers—knew the fix was in. They knew that compliant polls would cook the numbers to show that Biden was 10, 15, or even 17 points ahead nationally and in all the battleground states even though he was more or less tied or even behind. The psychological, which means the political effect of that, was to insinuate an element of unreality into the whole campaign and to present the public, and the pundits who were there to spoonfeed them, with a false narrative about the performance and therefore the prospects of the two candidates.

The committee fielding Biden also knew that the media was almost totally on board with a Biden candidacy. This was clear during the campaign when an overwhelming majority of media coverage was both hostile to Trump and almost comically careful about Biden.

Consider the conspiracy of silence about Hunter Biden’s laptop or the revelations of Hunter’s former business partner Tony Bobulinski. With the exception of a few dissident outlets, there was an extraordinary conspiracy of silence about these and other stories critical of Biden’s behavior. (Special praise goes to the New York Post and to Tucker Carlson for bucking the trend and bringing these stories to the public.)

That most of the media was all-in for Biden was also clear during the election itself. Fox News notoriously acted as a cheerleader for Biden. They refused to call Florida for Trump for hours after it was clear that he had won it. They then ceded Arizona to Biden, though it was by no means clear that he had prevailed there and some voters were still in line at the polls. Fox eventually walked back its call (sort of), but only after the damage to Trump’s momentum had been clocked. Two days after the election, Fox refuses to call Alaska and other states for Trump even though it is crystal clear that he has won them.

Finally, the forces arrayed behind Biden knew that the whole bureaucracy of the state—the poll workers and postal workers in battleground states, for example—would be on board for Biden and would be carefully coached in deploying techniques to manufacture or suppress ballots, as necessary, and skew the vote.

We see all this playing out before our eyes—or, rather, we see the external manifestations of the massive effort to queer the election for Donald Trump.

Read the entire article HERE.

No Matter Who Wins, Tech Addiction Is Becoming Our Most Pressing Crisis

Via The Federalist

I’m much less concerned with who is president than what’s happening in our pockets. For all the media chatter this week, after networks rolled out their top talent in tony newsrooms, the most important segment was arguably Tristan Harris’s appearance on “The Joe Rogan Experience.”

Harris, who you may recognize from “The Social Dilemma,” is a Google ethicist turned Silicon Valley whistleblower. After four days, his two-hour discussion with Rogan has 2.7 million views. I disagree with him on a host of issues, but Harris is completely correct that conversations about bias and censorship and disinformation are actually downstream of the conversation we need to have about the technology itself.

Like other researchers, Harris describes smartphones as slot machines, tempting us constantly with the prospect of dopamine boosts via social media apps. Those apps, from Gmail to Facebook to Instagram to YouTube to Twitter to TikTok, are deliberately designed to maximize our attention. That’s how they compete with one another, and that’s how they make money. That means the more time they can get us to spend on our smartphones, the more money they make. They’re making us worse and it’s making them rich.

This is why Twitter, for instance, prizes bombast and conflict. It’s what sucks us in. We’re increasingly interacting with each other in forums that involve no face-to-face contact, less accountability to our immediate physical community, publish our thoughts in digital stone, and incentivize conflict. It’s changing us, changing our children, weakening our culture, and absolutely decimating almost our entire media.

It’s one thing to be addicted to a physically unhealthy product like cigarettes. It’s another thing to be addicted to a product that controls much of our discourse and personal interaction.

An exchange between Kara Swisher and Tom Nichols on Twitter captured this well. Where Nichols argued Facebook has too much power because “Americans are zombies,”

Read the entire article HERE.

Police Will Pilot a Program to Live-Stream Amazon Ring Cameras

Via EFF.org

This is not a drill. Red alert: The police surveillance center in Jackson, Mississippi, will be conducting a 45-day pilot program to live stream the security cameras, including Amazon Ring cameras, of participating residents.

Since Ring first made a splash in the private security camera market, we’ve been warning of its potential to undermine the civil liberties of its users and their communities. We’ve been especially concerned with Ring’s 1,000+ partnerships with local police departments, which facilitate bulk footage requests directly from users without oversight or having to acquire a warrant.

While people buy Ring cameras and put them on their front door to keep their packages safe, police use them to build comprehensive CCTV camera networks blanketing whole neighborhoods. This serves two police purposes. First, it allows police departments to avoid the cost of buying surveillance equipment and to put that burden onto consumers by convincing them they need cameras to keep their property safe. Second, it evades the natural reaction of fear and distrust that many people would have if they learned police were putting up dozens of cameras on their block, one for every house.

Now, our worst fears have been confirmed. Police in Jackson, Mississippi, have started a pilot program that would allow Ring owners to patch the camera streams from their front doors directly to a police Real Time Crime Center. The footage from your front door includes you coming and going from your house, your neighbors taking out the trash, and the dog walkers and delivery people who do their jobs in your street. In Jackson, this footage can now be live streamed directly onto a dozen monitors scrutinized by police around the clock. Even if you refuse to allow your footage to be used that way, your neighbor’s camera pointed at your house may still be transmitting directly to the police.

Only a few months ago, Jackson stood up for its residents, becoming the first city in the southern United States to ban police use of face recognition technology. Clearly, this is a city that understands invasive surveillance technology when it sees it, and knows when police have overstepped their ability to invade privacy.

Read the entire article HERE.

DC votes to decriminalize hallucinogenic mushrooms by wide margin

Via The Hill

Voters in Washington, D.C., moved by a wide margin to decriminalize the growing, possession and noncommercial distribution of hallucinogenic mushrooms on Tuesday.

More than 76 percent of voters supported Initiative 81 with just over 40 percent of precincts reporting, according to the district’s Board of Elections.

The ballot measure would direct D.C. Metropolitan Police to shift the “non-commercial planting, cultivating, purchasing, transporting, distributing, possessing, and/or engaging in practices with entheogenic plants and fungi” to among its lowest law enforcement priorities.

The District’s attorney general and the U.S. attorney for the District are also called upon as part of the measure to cease prosecution of those listed activities.

Tuesday’s measure in D.C. was one of several drug-related voter initiatives on the ballot around the country as part of Tuesday’s elections.

Read the entire article HERE.

Pollsters Claim Their Polls Were 100% Correct, But Everyone Voted Wrong

Via The Babylon Bee (Satire)

U.S.—After grossly miscalculating the election results in almost every possible way, pollsters are insisting that their polls were indeed 100% correct except that everyone just voted wrong.

“We stand by our polling 100%,” said Ned Boop, who is a very smart pollster who wears fancy-looking glasses. “Our methodology and results were entirely correct and we’re also very intelligent. It’s just that all the stupid people we polled voted incorrectly like dumb-heads.”

CNN is also backing the findings of their pollsters who predicted the complete opposite of almost every single thing that actually happened on Election Day.

“We believe our pollsters are owed an apology from the American people,” said one of the CNN guys who sit in the background of the TV set during broadcasts while pretending to look at a monitor. “It was cruel and inconsiderate of them to make our pollsters look this bad by voting differently than all our very smart pollsters thought they would.”

Nancy Pelosi also shared outrage at the American people for defying the pollsters and has promised to introduce legislation requiring voters to obey the pollsters during the next election.

At the time of publication, pollsters are now enthusiastically predicting a 1000-year Democrat reign.

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

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